Blood Letters
by Sinister Scribe
Summary: Messages written in the blood of victims begin to tell a story. Gibbs has to ask someone from his past to help out. Can he handle that though? Rated for language and scenes of an adult nature.
1. The Morning After What

**First NCIS fic, i started writing it months ago. Forgot about it and then started it again at the urging of Prinnie when she discovered that I'd started the fic. This is set somewhere in the first two seasons. Twilight (the episode, not the travesty of a book) hasn't happened yet but i will be dealing with it. **

**There IS an OC in this, because the story requires a level of expertise that they don't have in the team. She won't be a Mary Sue because, if you didn't already know, i've been writing on fanfiction forever. **

**So, enough yapping, read on and enjoy. **

**Reviews are love. **

**Chapter 1: The Morning After What?**

Special Agent Jethro Gibbs awoke slowly.

It was not his usual habit to do anything slowly, especially waking. Long years as a Marine had conditioned him to wake with eye snapping leg swinging motions that would have him out of bed and on his feet before he'd realised his alarm wasn't even blaring yet.

This morning, however, there was no alarm, no eye snapping and definitely no legs swinging over the side of the mattress so his feet could hit cold wooden floorboards. Gibbs mulled over this change with a suppressed urgency he couldn't fully feel yet. His system was caffeine deprived and, instead of jonesing for a fix of thick black Java, he felt incredibly _relaxed._ He marshalled what few brain cells he could and ordered his fumbling senses to report in to the meagre grey matter he was sporting this moment.

Hearing was first, bird song, little to no traffic noise. The morning was still blushing new then. Sight confirmed this in its limited capacity when Gibbs steadfastly refused to open steely blue eyes. He could see a pinkish yellow of morning light against his closed lids. That was all though, he was quite enjoying this odd languor and felt in no hurry to break it. Taste reported unusual findings; coffee from last night's dinner, steak from said same dinner and some flavour he couldn't put a name to. It was then that Touch and Smell made their findings known at almost the exact same moment and a stiffness rolled over Gibb's well muscled frame. Touch confirmed that, yes, there was something or someone warm and soft lying half under him, the slight weight of an arm or similar wrapped around his neck, fingers buried in his tousled silver hair. Smell was screaming now over the shocking details that Touch was blasting Gibbs' brain with its intriguing information. He could smell…perfume, familiar and teasing, and the heavier gut tugging primal scent of sex swirled into his head and caused a corresponding spiral of heat down his spine like a freight train to crash between his legs. Gibbs ignored his rapidly rising cock and turned the conundrum over in his head.

It wasn't that it was unusual for him to seek out female company. He did it whenever he felt the need, but it was more of an itch that needed to be scratched than for the need of any deep and meaningful feminine companionship and all his chosen partners new the steps he was dancing when he picked them. Sometimes he went for months without an interlude of intimacy, content to stay home alone in the dark lair of his basement with his mug of cool bourbon and the steady rasp of the sandpaper going over the contours of his latest boat.

Of course, the contours pressed up against him right now felt a lot more pleasing to the eyes and body than any hunk of shaped wood.

She moaned slightly, a soft sated sound, and shifted under him. Gibbs sucked in a breath when he confirmed that they were both very much naked together. He still refused to open his eyes. He was finding this a pleasing fantasy and had no intention of opening his eyes and letting the real world crash in and taint it with crushing things like reality. He buried his face deeper against the silk of her hair and wondered idly at the colour of the thick mass as he inhaled the tantalising scent of passion fruit shampoo. Would she be his favoured flavour of redhead? Surely not a blonde, not really his type at all, a brunette was a distinct possibility, though there was only really one that successfully grabbed and held his attention. Gibbs felt an answering throb south of the equator when thoughts of _Her_ bubbled up in the messy soup of his brain this morning.

He wondered if his as of yet nameless lover would be up for a second round this morning. He shifted slightly, hands sliding up over her hip, the inward curve of her waist and then the tempting slope of her breast and felt a corresponding burn in his muscles that announced round one must have been a hell of a thing. He wasn't as young as he had been, approaching the big 5-0 mark, but he had the feeling that he had given as good as he'd gotten last night…now, if only he could remember what exactly _had_ gone on last night, he would be feeling a whole lot better.

She shifted under him again, finger smoothing through his hair and a soft grunt issuing from her throat. "You're heavy." She gave an almost happy sounding grumble and Gibbs immediately shifted to accommodate her lungs a little better.

"Better?"

"Hmm." She sighed.

Silence reigned in the room for a further thirty seconds before the simultaneous recognition rocketed through both of them and two sets of eyes snapped open in surprise.

Gibbs shot bolt upright and sat back on his haunches in a blur of movement so fast that he over balanced. The world tilted crazily and he swore explosively as he tipped over the edge of the bed and thumped to the floor hard enough to have his shoulder grumbling with the crank of pain. He righted himself, rolling to a crouch and snatched the first thing his eyes landed on to afford him some modesty. He held it in front of everything important and finally stood at his full height. The tornado was not long in landing.

"What the _hell_ are you doing here?" She snapped at him, snagging the bed sheet and hauling it sideways over her body to cover her torso. Gibbs' eyes started at her bare feet, toes painted with pink polish, and worked his way up.

Her legs were long, toned and curving, he frowned at the finger shaped bruises on the hip that he could see. His gaze skated up higher, over the long slide of naked skin he could see over her side, the just visible curve of her breast that the sheet wasn't quite managing to cover, the love bites and out and out bite marks that marred her neck and collar bones, the swollen cast her lips had and the heavy satisfied, if slightly alarmed, look her eyes had.

"Uhm..." Gibbs looked down at himself, completely naked save for the bite marks over his chest and the ten scored nail marks dragged down over his chest and the cobbled muscles of his stomach…and the crocheted…pillow he was holding over his essentials. "Broadening my interest in needlepoint?" He blurted and stared at what was stitched into the pillow's surface.

_Always remember rule number 12. _

Oh, the irony.

"Gibbs…"

"I don't know how I got here. I don't remember last night and I definitely don't remember anything that went on…here." He risked taking one hand off the pillow long enough to gesture at the bed and she paled at what he revealed. Let's just say the pillow wasn't doing as great a job as it could have been. He clapped his hand back next to the pillow.

"I'm just gonna…" He grabbed his slacks from the floor and his shirt. He couldn't find his shorts at the moment but he didn't worry himself to much over it. He had enough on his mind at the moment. "Leave so you can…uh huh." Gibbs backed out of the room and found himself in a small en suite bathroom.

Stuff on his mind like waking up in a woman's bed after a night of wild sex he didn't remember.

Or, more worryingly, waking up in Caitlin Todd's bed after a wild night of sex with her that he couldn't remember.

Oh yeah, that was really a lot more pressing right now.


	2. Awkward Much

**Here's chappie two. **

**Hey look, a Kate centric chapter!!**

**I suggest if you don't like Kate (which is a bit dim if you're reading this fic) that you please go off and grow a brain and leave me alone. **

**I ask once politely. **

**Reviews are love…flamers are just asking for it. **

**Have a nice day!!**

**Chapter 2: Awkward Much**

Kate sucked in a long breath, trying to calm herself, and failed miserably. All she could breathe in was him. His smell, his taste, _him. _

Jesus, she'd just woken up in bed with her boss.

Her gruff, much older, attractive boss, but her boss nonetheless. She swallowed hard, hand fisting in her bed sheets and stared into space. She couldn't get the image of him to stop burning into her mind. God, she had known he was in good shape for a man approaching middle age but…WOW. Broad shoulders, brawny arms, muscles covering his chest like great slabs and rippling over his stomach like he was smuggling paint rollers under there. Her mouth went dry at the thought of all that tanned skin available for her viewing pleasure. The bite marks on his neck and shoulders, the scored marks down his body where nails, her nails, had dragged down over him in a primal marking. The clawing his back had suffered, she'd seen it when he'd half turned to duck into the cramped space of her en suite bathroom.

She shut her eyes and tried to get a grip on herself. It was a bit difficult when every muscle in her body, especially the long neglected internal ones, were complaining at their impromptu exercise. Kate had to admit though, that she had the feeling that she had _thoroughly _enjoyed last night and it was such a damn pity she had no memory of it.

The last thing she remembered was…drinking some wine at the Christmas party that Gibbs and the team had been invited/forced to go to in order to grease political wheels. Gibbs had been fairly adamant in his refusal of going and it had been Kate that had finally convinced him to go by saying that he couldn't cut it with all the black ties that were going to be there.

So naturally one Jethro Gibbs had found himself at said same black tie affair, schmoozing with the best of them because someone had said he couldn't. The only sure fire way to get the man to do anything was to predict that he couldn't.

Even then, it wasn't always guaranteed to work, Gibbs hated being predictable in any way, shape or form.

Well, he had definitely thrown her for a loop with this one.

She tried again to remember anything after her second glass of champagne and failed miserably. She had been talking to someone, a man maybe? The details were fuzzy and that was most definitely not like her.

Rough sex with her superiors was hardly her usual bag either but she had most definitely jumped her boss at some point in the night and given him a thorough taste test. Her cheeks scored hot and sensations that were missing the accompanying memories rocketed through her body. She felt like she should be reliving whatever had gone on between the sheets last night, but there were no accompanying images. That shouldn't bother her. She should be relieved. Glad that she couldn't remember anything to get embarrassed over. Not that she wasn't mortified anyway…Kate sighed and dropped her head into her palm, clutching the sheet tighter over her chest. Good Lord this was going to be horrific to live with. She was disturbed, sore and feeling more than a little vulnerable right now. Her memory was a film that had been exposed to light too soon and all she had was black to go on. She had the uncomfortable feeling that her drink had been spiked last night. Judging by what Gibbs had said about his own lack of memory, he was sitting in a similar boat up a similar creek with a similar lack of paddles.

Yup, Kate was truly, royally screwed in the truest and broadest senses of the word.

She jumped when a bleating phone yanked her from her reverie. Launching herself across the bed, desperate to latch onto anything that would distract her from her current predicament, she snatched up the cell and flipped it open.

"Oh!" Was all she could manage to say into the phone when every muscle in her body screamed at the rough treatment. Oh God, she'd be lucky if she could walk again within the next week. Hauling her faculties back into order she croaked into the line. "Todd here."

"Kate?" DiNozzo's voice cracked down the line, his confusion evident. "What are you doing with Gibbs' cell?"

Kate yanked the phone away and gazed at it with horror. True enough, Gibbs' slim-line silver cell stared blankly back at her, the colour display cheerfully informing her that she was on the line with TonE DiNoz.

"Fuck." She squeaked and put the phone back to her ear.

"_What_ did you just say?" Tony demanded and Kate scrabbled through her sex addled brain for some semblance of a coherent lie. Damn it, she was not a good liar.

"I stubbed my toe." The first little white one was relatively easy. The big whopper that came next was hard enough to manhandle into believability. "Gibbs…gave me his coat as we were leaving the party last night, I was cold. It must have had his phone in it." That sounded like Gibbs. Didn't it?

"What happened to your coat?" Tony asked and Kate blinked. What the hell did it matter what had happened to her freaking coat?!

"I…forgot it." She managed after a moment of fishing and stumbled from her bed. Oh yes, walking was definitely going to be a learning curve for the next couple of hours. The sheet got tangled in her legs so she dropped it to the floor in favour of hauling her robe from the back of her bedroom door and trying to ease into it while still talking on the phone.

"What? A tailored black cashmere overcoat and you forget it? That thing must have been worth a month's pay." Tony's voice was sceptical and she could have quite happily maimed him there and then.

"Tony, did you call for a reason or just to question my wardrobe?" She snapped at him and went ramrod straight when heavy hands landed on her shoulders. Nobody else's palms weighed that much. She stood perfectly still as he slid the dark red silk of her robe up over her skin and then pulled the belt to her side so he could tie it for her. She turned to stare up at him wordlessly, heat crawling up her throat and only half listened to what Tony was now saying.

"Yeah, we got a case, murdered Navy Lieutenant, it's pretty nasty. Wanted to give the boss a heads up. I'll just call his house…"

"No!" Kate blurted. "I mean…I think he's…with someone."

Gibbs arched a brow, looking a lot more composed now that he had his tux shirt and slacks back on. He looked positively edible with just one too many buttons undone at his neck and the sleeves rolled up to the elbow to reveal muscle roped forearms.

"Ha-HAH! The boss-man scored! Maybe that'll put him in a better mood for a while…"

Kate stopped listening as the full power of the patented Gibbs Glare was levelled at her with an icy cold intensity. She shivered without realising it. His hand was still at her waist, burning her through the silk. He seemed to finally notice his hand and snatched it away. Ah, not as composed as she had first though then. Tony was still buzzing on about how it was 'about damn time' for Gibbs and Kate finally broke into his diatribe, that was within full hearing of said same boss-man, out of sheer pity.

"Tony, just tell me about the case so I can get over there. I'll go by Gibbs' place and drop off his cell." She couldn't resist grinning as she added. "He'll be less likely to bite off my head if I have a reason for disturbing him."

"Oh, sure." Tony rattled off the address to the scene. They exchanged goodbyes and Kate flipped the phone shut, swallowing hard.

"That was Tony." It was unnecessary to tell him that, of course he already knew, but she needed to say something to fill the cavernous space looming over them.

"I gathered." He rumbled and his voice _thrummed_ through her. She'd always had a thing for deep husky voices in guys. Alan Rickman had done bad, bad things to her when she'd first seen _Robin Hood_ with Kevin Costner in it.

A weak 'heh' was all the answer she could muster. She handed the phone to him like it was burning her and wrapped her arms around herself. "Gibbs, I…"

"We were drugged. Don't worry about it."

Her head snapped up at his verbal shrug. _Don't worry about it?_ Oh sure, she'd been roofied and so had her boss and she needn't worry about it!?

"I'll fix this." He told her calmly, snagging his black tuxedo jacket from the floor and shrugging it on. He looked damned sinful in the thing. She had thought the same last night, she remembered that much. She had also wondered how good he would look out of the tux…the only answer she could come up with now, having gotten the answer she was after was, _fine. _The man looked damn _fine_ out of his beautifully tailored tuxedo. She was brought back to the real world with a thump when his hand petted her shoulder awkwardly as he sidled towards the door. Kate turned with him, keeping him within her sights.

There was a look on her face that Gibbs had never seen before. Calculating, predatory…hot.

Kate wasn't even aware that she looked ready to jump him again. That her body was preparing to do just that.

"Don't worry." He reassured her, misreading her expression entirely, and headed for the door. "And don't be late for the scene." He shot over his shoulder and headed out the door.

Kate glared at the shutting door, reached blindly and hurled the first thing that came to hand at him. Another throw pillow, this one was not crocheted, but it hit the door with a satisfying thump anyway. She spun on her bare heel, heading for the bathroom and yanking her robe from her shoulders. It was weird, she was uncomfortable and couldn't help but feel that this would change her and Gibbs' relationship on a deep and fundamental level.

She also couldn't help but feel the raw and burning need to fling herself down the stairs, pin him to the nearest flat surface and have another go. This time so she could remember how she'd gained the sweet little aches deep in her body.

Kate growled under her breath, nerves biting with temper and the twin emotions clawing each other in her chest jacking up her jumpy state to the point where she was ready to shoot something just to feel a little better.

Don't worry about it?

Yeah, _that_ was real likely.

**Sinister Scribe**

Kate inhaled a deep calming breath for the second time that morning and held it as she walked over the threshold to the crime scene. The scene was a fairly non-descript motel. Just like hundreds of others by the roadside all across the country. There was absolutely nothing that made it stand out from its carbon copy fellows aside from what lay in wait within the walls of room 16. She let the breath out on a shudder that she tried in vain to mask. It never failed to hit her just how horrific a person's final moments could be. She swallowed against the bile churning up her throat and the metallic tang of blood heavy in the air. Smelled like too much copper.

Her eyes swept the crime scene methodically, like she had been taught. Her hands already encased in latex gloves and her digital backed SLR camera heavy in her grip. She began to tick off the details in her head, looking for anything that stood out as a bold clue even as she snapped photograph after photograph of the scene.

The victim, Lieutenant Marty Johansson, knelt one bloodstained knees in his dress whites, turned scarlet in places, by the far wall of the motel room. The bed and small table had been pushed aside to bare the wall completely. Bloody symbols covered the manila space, circles, geometric shapes and other glyphs that Kate couldn't even begin to guess the meaning of. Kate took several photos in quick succession of the entire wall but kept most of her shots to the overview. McGee was already painstakingly taking close ups of every inch of the graffitied wall. Kate turned her attention to the arcs of blood wheeling across the worn peach carpeting. Most of the blood was either written into the wall or pooling around the victim's knees. Kate refused to give him his name. She knew it but she would not use it. As soon as he had a name he had a mother and someone that might miss him. She had thought that there had been mention of a wife and new born child in his file but her eyes had skated away from that information before she could properly absorb it.

Kate sucked in another bracing breath and stepped closer to the body, avoiding any blood evidence with her plastic bootied feet.

"Ugh." Kate couldn't hold in the reaction when she saw the front of the body. Her face turned away and she clamped her eyes shut of their own volition.

The victim was slumped forward, his head and one shoulder resting against the wall, smearing a few of the lower symbols. A chunky Swiss army knife lay in the rigoured fingers of a grey hand, stained with blood. The front of his dress whites were nowhere near as pristine as the back.

He had hacked into his own stomach with the ill-suited blade of the comparatively small knife. Several incisions were shallow but several more were lower over his abdomen and had strung together to form one gaping messy wound. Kate stopped breathing altogether for a moment to get a handle on herself. She lifted the camera with slightly shaking hands and photographed the wet ropes of the victim's intestines that had spilled from his body down over his lap and onto the floor.

"Yeah, it's pretty bad." McGee murmured. He was carefully swabbing some of the red from the wall to do a quick pheno test and make sure that it was indeed blood. "This writing stuff is freaking me out though." The younger investigator admitted.

"Don't be stupid, probie, it ain't writing, it's gibberish." Tony stopped beside them and made his opinion known, hands on hips.

Kate took half a step back and scanned the wall. Her cinnamon eyes narrowed a fraction as she studied it hard.

"The guy probably got high on something, took a bad trip and started talking to the mother ship or…something." Tony continued and trailed off when Kate turned to him with a withering glare.

"You're wrong." She told him emphatically and jumped when a voice issued just behind her.

"How?"

All three of the team members whirled to look at Gibbs standing in the middle of the room. He had The Glare on at full blast and his gaze settled on Kate like a physical thing. Suddenly there didn't seem all that much oxygen in the room anymore. Kate told herself to get a grip, she was in a crime scene, there was a dead guy not two feet from her but…those eyes wouldn't let hers alone. She swallowed hard and tried to remember what she was saying. She turned to back to the wall, ignoring Gibbs in his inky black shirt, stone grey slacks and a dove grey blazer. His shirt was open enough to reveal one of the harder bites she'd given him on his throat last night. Heat suffused her face when that knowledge really hit home for the first time.

She had marked him.

Her teeth on his skin, bruising, biting, claiming. She shivered and blinked hard when he rumbled at her.

"Kate? How is DiNozzo wrong?"

"It's not gibberish." She croaked finally, her brain clicking into some semblance of motion. She lifted a gloved hand and pointed at a circle with a messy cross through it, she could see it had been painted with two fingers smeared in the victim's own blood. "This is a compass." She switched positions so her arm could point along the same line as the uppermost point of the cross. "That way is North and these," here she indicated several groups of symbols clustered together. "They're in groups of six each. Exactly like coordinates. It's a location."

"Do you recognise any of the symbols?" He was standing closer now. Much closer. Kate's heart was pounding in her chest.

"No. I've never seen anything like it before. I just recognised the pattern." She swallowed hard and looked up at his profile. He was frowning, something going on behind those cool blue eyes that she couldn't properly identify. "Have…you seen it before?"

Gibbs looked down at her and Kate paled, there was something raw in his eyes. Something that made every hair on her body want to leap up on end. It was a hot and primal…_thing_ behind those blue eyes and she didn't know if she'd be able to handle it if it ever got loose.

"No…but I think I know someone who has." He pulled his cell from his pocket and flipped it open, scrolling through the memory until he hit on the number labelled Doc Jekyll and hit dial. He clapped the slim line set to his ear and waited out the rings. On the fifth burr down his ear there was a click and a low feminine voice with a husk of a chuckle filled his ear.

"Yeah, I know, it's been a while." He murmured into the phone line. He cast a look back at the wall and got to the matter at hand. "Listen, Dianne, I need your help…"

Tony looked sideways at Kate when she stiffened at the boss speaking a woman's name. The gentle tone of his voice as he spoke down the phone.

Oh, _that_ was not a happy looking Kate.


	3. Twisted Like Knots

_Here we go, introduuucccinnnggg-guh:_

_Dianne Caine…played by Kristen Chenoweth (dunno if that's spelled right) aka Olive from Pushing Daisis, Glinda from Wicked aaaannndd…Leo's Public Relations person in West Wing._

_She usually has blonde hair but it's strawberry fiery blonde for the purposes of this fic. She may or may not be related to a certain CSI that we all know and love and she may or may not work with a certain Criminal Minds crew…depends on how I'm feeling as I write. _

_Enjoy. Reviews are love. _

_Chapter 3: Twisted Like Knots_

Gibbs was not avoiding Kate.

This lie might have rung a little more true had he not been, well, avoiding her for the past twenty four hours. He had been in her presence a grand total of three times and all of those times had been with the company of at least two other team members. He had to get a hold of himself. Even Tony was beginning to notice what was going on.

McGee had said nothing, as was his fashion. Not wanting to prod the sleeping wolf that could be Gibbs' temper. Abby had pointedly looked between the two of them, narrowing heavily made up eyes and finally humming in the back of her throat before slurping from her Caf-Pow and also saying nothing. Ducky'd had that infernal grin on his face that usually accompanied the old coroner having found some case breaking evidence and getting to introduce it to the team via some segue from his Scotland Yard days. Tony of course had demanded with his usual aplomb to know 'what Kate had gone and done to get Gibbs so riled?'. A sufficiently shocking head-slap had assured Tony quietly and firmly that he was not to bring up the subject again. Gibbs just didn't want to be around anyone right now. At least not someone who might pick up on the tension between him and a certain subordinate that he'd woken up naked and tangled with yesterday morning.

Which was why he found himself in a coffee shop waiting for someone he'd rather not wait on. He drummed his fingers on the table and wondered if it had been a stupid idea to even call her in the first place. She was the best he knew at what she did…whatever that really was, he wasn't quite sure, but she was really good at it at any rate.

"Heya, Jethro!"

Gibbs jumped when the perky voice announced right in his ear and a glossy mouth pressed wetly to his cheek in a smacker of a kiss. He glared at her and smeared his hand over his cheek to wipe away the frosty pink colour printed there in a pursed lip shape.

He looked her over, questioned what the hell he was doing for the millionth time and tried not to wince when his stomach tied itself in a knot.

Felt like your standard reef knot.

"Caine." He greeted her as civilly as he could. She pouted down at him, which wasn't very far. At four feet eleven inches, she was nearly at eye level with him while he sat. She hitched a hand at her waist and arched a brow at him. He ducked his head and sighed. "Dianne." He amended. "Coffee." He stood and offered her the paper cup that was a twin to his own. Right down to the gravy thick all black blend swilling about inside it.

"Mmmm, java!" She took the cup from him and it looked almost comically large in her small hand. They headed for the exit and out onto the street.

Gibbs was glad, he knew conversations with Dianne never ended well and he'd rather they were out where not that many people would witness their version of bickering and there would be less civilians in the line of fire. Sometimes literally. Dianne was armed and extremely dangerous. Her cute girl next door image not withstanding, Gibbs had seen her make men three times her size kiss dirt and like it. They had never come to blows, but he wasn't completely confidant that he would come out on top.

"Let's go to the park." She decided for them. She slanted a look his way with electric teal eyes, just to see if she'd hit a nerve, and carried on as normal when he didn't rise to the bait. Conversing with Dianne was about picking and choosing battles.

"Okay." He took her elbow when they crossed the street, an old habit, and she didn't shake him off like she might have another man.

Dianne had to work hard just to be treated as an equal in Quantico. If Kate thought she had it bad in the NCIS headquarters, she should try being a four foot eleven strawberry blonde with a perky disposition (when it suited her) in a building filled with the FBI's finest.

"There's something different about you." She was looking up at him with slightly narrowed eyes, as if trying to see the detail she was missing.

His stomach did another knot and resolved itself into a strangled out Sheepshank.

"Got my haircut last week." He offered as innocently as he knew how. He should have known better than to think that she would miss the fact that he was crawling the walls inside his mind.

"Your hair never changes." She snorted. "No…" Her eyes widened. "You had sex!" She pointed at him and several heads turned on the street to stare at them. He swallowed hard and tried to hurry her along the sidewalk and away from interested stares. "Twice! You're blushing." She began to chuckled a deep and wicked chuckle that he still found sexy…and so did everyone else judging by the way more heads turned. Gibbs took his time to look her over again. Past what he just expected to see.

She was still tiny, compact and curvy. Comparatively long legs going ten to the dozen to keep pace with his much larger stride. Her flame coloured hair bouncing about her heart shaped face in a cascade of waves to her shoulders and her standard black Fed suit garnished with a fuchsia shirt that was just shy of clashing with everything and no doubt got her into trouble with her superiors. The pink heels clopped merrily on the pavement and her trademark grin was firmly in place. She always looked like she was trying to stifle that dirty laugh of hers.

She was still as tenacious as an OCD bulldog though.

"So, who was she? Do I know her? Is she Mrs Gibbs the fourth?" She slugged back a gulp of coffee. "It is just four, right? I've not missed one between now and the last time we spoke?"

"We spoke last week!" His stomach was now doing advanced yoga and working itself into an agitated feeling Anchor Hitch.

"Trying to hide from me in the supermarket doesn't count." She looped her arm through his and steered him into the park. Oh God, she was going to make him sit down and talk about this. "And you're avoiding the question."

"Damn skippy I'm avoiding the question." He muttered and covered it as best he could with a slurp of coffee. She elbowed him sharply.

"Well?"

"I'm not telling you who she was. No, you don't know her and she's definitely not the fourth wife." He bit out at her.

"You do want her though." It wasn't a question so he didn't dignify it with an answer. "Now, this IS interesting. Is this why you called me?"

Gibbs blinked and then frowned fiercely. Mainly at himself. She always had a way of getting him to talk about things he didn't want to talk about. She'd gotten him so tangled up in himself that he'd completely forgotten about the eight by ten glossies in the folder under his arm.

"No, there's some evidence I want you take a look at."

"Ooh, official NCIS business? Please tell me I get to see some men in uniform." She grinned at him and his glare caused it to falter a little. "Well, you always did look really hot in yours." He blinked at that but soldiered on before he got too bogged down in the details.

"Unofficial. A personal opinion. Nothing more."

"Translation; we don't want Fornell butting in."

"Again." Gibbs spoke with an arctic tone.

"Walked into that one." Dianne rolled her eyes at herself and took a seat on the edge of the marble fountain. Rearing horses plunged as the centre piece, snorting misted water and rolling their blank eyes at the mermaids clinging to their manes. Gibbs stood and handed her the folder. She grabbed his wrist instead and yanked him down to sit next to her. He ground his teeth in frustration but settled himself while she kicked off her pink heels and crossed her legs under her.

She flipped open the folder eagerly and he watched as her professional persona slipped to the fore and she scrutinised the crime scene shots with an intensity that could match his own. She scanned each photograph carefully, taking in everything she could before moving onto the next one. She set her coffee down and forgot about it completely, her attention consumed by what he had just given her. When she was done, she flipped through them all one more time and then filed them neatly back into the folder, handing it back to him.

Her eyes met his and they held each other's gaze for a long time.

"Professional opinion?"

"Yeah." He nodded to her.

She looked troubled.

"You're going to want me in on this one, Jethro."

Gibbs' stomach heaved and twisted itself into an ugly Angler's Loop.

This was worse than he'd thought.

**Sinister Scribe**

Kate sat at her desk in the bullpen and tried to bury herself deeper under the drifts of paperwork taking over her desk. She refused to let her thoughts turn back to _him_ and instead stared sightlessly at the file in front of her. Lieutenant Johansson's file. It wasn't really working though. She had been on a knife edge of nerves for the past twenty four hours and every time she looked at Gibbs just seemed to make it worse. Tunnelling fingers through long mahogany hair in a sharp irritated movement and huffing out a breath, Kate flipped to the next page in the file and scanned the black and white information even as it seemed to bleed before her eyes.

Medical report from Ducky in regards to the post mortem carried out on Johansson. Kate pursed her lips, concentrated harder and scolded herself internally. A man had died. Killed himself and she was sitting fawning over her boss when she should be trying to understand the whys and wherefores to give some semblance of peace to his family. She exhaled a gusty sigh of self loathing and blinked harder, scanning the medical report again.

No alcohol.

No drugs.

No poisons.

No toxins.

Johansson had been as clean as a whistle at the time of his death. His blood had anyway.

Conversely, there were no brain lesions, swelling, internal bleeding or any _other_ form of cranial damage that might explain why Johansson had suddenly decided it would be an absolutely marvellous idea to gut himself with his own penknife.

No history of mental illness within his family either.

No hint of mental illness in _any _of the Lieutenant's previous psyche evaluations.

Yep, Ducky had confirmed with his report what Kate had already believed; aside from being decidedly _dead_, Johansson was the picture of health.

Kate turned these facts over in her head.

People didn't _just_ go crazy at the drop of a hat. They didn't wake up one morning and decide it was a damn fine idea to take out the sharp and pointies and make like a macabre Jackson Pollock. There had to be a factor she wasn't seeing. Something they were all missing.

Kate turned back to her computer, seizing the mouse and waggling it to disperse the NCIS shield and get the online report she was compiling on the case back on her screen. She bit her lip and scanned what she had already written in the delineated fields. Writing wasn't doing much for her today so she decided to try something a little more visual. Clicking on the image folder attachment, Kate set up a slide show of the crime scene photographs she had taken yesterday morning. She needed something to prod her brain into action.

The first photos were fairly inoffensive. Blood spatter and cast off on the carpet, furniture and walls. Click. Click. The back of Johansson's head, hair still neatly combed a tiny spot of crimson blood on the collar of his dress whites. She hadn't noticed that yesterday. Click. Close up of his slumped shoulder, the turn of his grey face. His expression chilling, more so because of his slightly smiling serenity than any twisted death mask of horror. Shudder. Click.

Click.

Kate's brain finally rolled into high gear. The cogs and wheels of her mind meshing together and rolling into that unstoppable perpetual motion that helped her pick up any given skill in the shortest time possible.

The symbols on the wall. Smeared in blood. Painstakingly etched by hand into the very fibres of the wallpaper itself.

Click. Click. Click…

Pause.

The symbols.

Johansson had been a navigator. Possible explanation, for the coordinates and the scrawled compass on the wall amongst the 'gibberish' as Tony had dubbed it. The symbols and glyphs on the wall, however, were way out of his league. McGee and Abby had conferred late into the previous night, high on Caf-Pow and Twinkies, to discover that, while none of the symbols matched directly, several of them had uncanny similarities to those of Sanskrit, Ancient Egyptian, Sumerian and even Babylonian. All dead languages. All of them requiring great skill and mental dexterity to learn and, no offence intended to the dead, but Johansson was a simple type. His wife had told Gibbs yesterday that he had liked to work with numbers, spending hours out in the backyard with his telescope staring up at the stars and making charts, but he couldn't master the simplest of foreign languages. He had even flunked high school French.

It didn't fit.

Something was off. A wire tripped in the back of her brain. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard for a long instant and then she opened a new window before she could changer her mind.

Accessing the case archive of the _entire_ NCIS career as a branch of the government, she meandered her cursor to the keyword search bar on the top right of the screen. She blew out a long breath and wondered what to type. She rattled off the first thing that came to mind.

_Blood letters. _

Search returns **2,169 **matching documents.

She worried her lip and highlighted the option to search just those files and narrow her net. Oooookaaaayy…she'd started this so she'd better finish it.

_Unidentified symbols/dead languages. _

Search returns **483 **matching documents.

Kate's heart began to pound and she tried to tell herself that this was all conjecture. She had absolutely no solid evidence to go on. This was pure gut feeling and she'd catch hell from Gibbs for wasting time if she was wrong but…if she was right…she might even get a 'good work' from Massa' Gibbs himself.

High praise indeed.

Her fingers flew over the keys.

_Ancient Egyptian/Sumerian/Babylonian. _

This was a long shot, what were the chances of someone in a previous case not only having seen the symbols but recognising them for the language that they were and not some random squiggles…what were the chances that there even _were_ symbols in another case? She hadn't even opened the files yet.

But she had that good feeling, so she tabbed enter with her third finger and held her breath.

Search returns **9** matching documents.

Kate swallowed past the sudden desert that her tongue had turned into and clicked on the first case file. She ignored the black and white textual details, she could pour over them later. Right now she was more interested in a visual comparison. She clicked on the JPEG attachment and her brows rose, her lips parting.

Hoooolleeeeeyyy….

She minimised that case file and moved onto the next. Same reaction. Surprise. Excitement. A little twinge of sickening dread.

The same with the next.

And the next and the next.

All nine case files.

Kate snagged a pen and sticky notepad so hard that she sent the cup holding the stationary to the floor. McGee looked up in surprise but she ignored him, scrawling down case file numbers and stack locations in the basement. She practically leapt from her seat and powered out the bullpen. Headed for the basement.

She needed hard copies.

Now.

**Sinister Scribe**

"Jethro, why are we in the basement?" Dianne hesitated at the doorway and Gibbs could have kicked himself. He'd forgotten about her phobia. She had a kind of claustrophobia. She couldn't stand to be underground. Even with the half windows near the ceiling, Abby's lab still looked like a death trap to her.

Abby frowned at the slightly familiar voice filtering in over the hum of her computers and kicked off from the desk with one studded biker boot to slide along the floor on her wheelie chair. McGee also lifted his head in interest and peered around his own monitor.

"It's just to get the rest of the photographs. You can be upstairs to do the briefing if you want." He offered and held out his hand to usher her in. He gave her a gentle shove into the room and she shot him a fierce little look before swallowing her fear and striding into the lab like she belonged there.

"Dianne!" Abby shot out of her seat.

She knew that voice.

Rounding the bank of monitors, rock posters and DNA close ups her black painted lips split into a wide grin and her pigtails swung jauntily.

"Abby!" Dianne grinned widely and hugged the lab tech that flew at her. "I haven't seen you in…well, far too long." Her smile was back.

"Oh. My. Gawd. Gibbs TOTALLY didn't tell me you were the languages guru that he was calling!" Here Abby reached over and slapped at Gibbs lightly. "I'd have come to meet you and everything!" Abby practically bounced her excitement.

"It's alright, honey." Dianne couldn't keep her grin off her face. She and Abby had always gotten on well. "It was more than a little crowded already." Something wry entered the Scot's voice but she brushed it aside with a dazzling smile. "Lab's bigger."

"Oh, yeah, NOTHING like what you have in Quantico, but still, I hold my own." Abby smirked and petted the nearest computer as if it were a loyal dog. "Ooh, I missed you SO much! Have you met McGee yet? MCGEE, C'MERE!" Abby did not wait for Vanity's reply and the strawberry blonde moved to follow her around the computer banks.

"Uh…hi?" Timothy McGee greeted the tiny dynamo that was Dianne with a slightly uncertain smile that Dianne thought was adorable. She took his hand and was slightly surprised at the firm grip he had. He had steel under that dorky exterior. It was easy to see why Abby liked him. She had only been in the lab for all of a minute, but Dianne was paid to read between the smallest of details.

"I hear that you and Abby were the ones to crack the ancient languages connection." She smiled that thousand watt smile at him and McGee tried not to flush to the roots of his hair.

"Uh…yes, ma'am."

"Don't call me 'ma'am', honey. I work for a living." Dianne waved him off. She didn't miss the slightest frown cross McGee's features and vanish just as quickly. Nor did she miss the slyly assessing glance that he shot at Gibbs. Putting two and two together and coming up with Pi R squared no doubt. Dianne decided to move on and distract him from his ponderings. She didn't want him McGee figuring it out too quickly. She liked her air of mystique.

"Alright, my young padawan. Show me what you have." Dianne removed her jacket and set her bag down over one of the wheelie chairs littering the lab. She noticed out of the corner of her eye that Gibbs was so quiet because he was frowning at his cell. She still thought it was adorable that he was such a technophobe, but he appeared to be paging the rest of his team, whoever they were.

McGee straightened in his seat like a student called to give demonstration and Dianne smiled at him. He was the people pleaser of them then.

"These are some of the shots of yesterday's crime scene and these are the symbols we've managed to identify so far." McGee pointed to two screens side by side, slid into a chair and brought up the pertinent photographs. Abby made a grumbling sound, disappointed at not getting to show off and dropped into the seat next to McGee. Determined not to be outdone, she brought up some of her own images.

"See; here are the originals that we got from reference sites. It took us forever to recognise them beecaaaausee…" Abby blipped at her screen and the images blinked before appearing fundamentally different. "They were mirrored onto the wall. Not written regular style. Ancient Egyptian and Babylonian are the most popular glyphs but none of the symbols match perfectly we think that could be because of the fact that Johansson wasn't exactly a genius."

Everybody turned to look at the Goth techie for a moment and Abby hunched her shoulders. "WHAT? He gutted himself like a stinky fish, couldn't have been batting all that high on the brain stakes."

"Print outs." Dianne demanded, flicking her fingers in a 'give me' gesture. Abby handed the pre-prepared flipped photographs and handed them to her. She knew that Dianne preferred actual physical copies that she could pick up and shuffle around. Dianne scrutinised these photographs carefully. She didn't lift her head when a tall man entered the room and slammed on the brakes when he saw her. She could feel him checking her out and let him.

3...2...1..._smack!_

Gibbs' hand connected harshly with the back of the newcomer's head.

Dianne hid a smile and moved to the another work bench. She tacked several of the photographs up next to each other on the wire racking separating one side from the other. She bent forward, back dipping, the hem of her shirt riding up, and scrutinised the photographs carefully.

Tony unashamedly ogled.

"Aah, grasshopper, so close, and yet, so lamentably far." She pointed to one symbol on the wall, snagged a reference photograph and then held it up next to it. "You're right in that these symbols are very _similar_ to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and of course Babylonian Cuneiform, not to mention a smattering of proto-cuneiform pictographs, but they are not accurate representations and, for someone to write them in their own blood speaks of a deeply seated dedication to their task, don't you think?" Dianne tilted her head and rocked on one heel a minute, her hip cocking at an angle.

Gibbs smacked the back of Tony's head again without even looking at the younger agent.

"Yeah, boss." Tony promptly found better things to look at. Well, maybe not _better_, but definitely safer.

"Of course, if one would go to all the trouble to _learn_ not just one dead language, but five…"

"Five?" Abby and McGee interrupted immediately.

"Yeah, there's some Sumerian and some Celtic Pictograms here too." She wobbled a finger vaguely at the glyphs. "But it does beg the question; why go to all this trouble to learn these languages and enough to warp them? What was he trying to say? So far it seems to be…nonsense."

"Told ya!" Tony snapped his fingers and pointed at McGee and Abby, lording his victory.

Dianne watched, faintly amused at Tony's victory dance. "Jeez, you let him walk around un-neutered, Gibbs?"

"For now." The barest of smirks on Gibbs' face.

Tony abruptly stopped dancing.

Dianne straightened, folding her arms over her chest. "It's possible that this is nothing more than an elaborate suicide note concocted by a very disturbed man."

"That your professional opinion?" Gibbs wanted to know.

"I'm saying it's an option. Despite Abby's insistence, Lieutenant Johansson must have been an intelligent man. He was well groomed, respected and had rank. As a navigator he would have been required to have a certain aptitude for learning and many of the dead languages are based on numerical coding, the Mayans for example, rather than the idioms and cultural references that make up our own languages today."

Here she huffed a breath. "He _could _have learned this. He _could_ have simply gone mad and written these symbols onto the wall as some kind of obscure epitaph that made sense only to him and he _could_ have simply 'gutted himself like a stinky fish'." Here she shot a sly glance at Abby who grinned unrepentant.

"I have no idea what that meant, but it sounded hot." Tony offered his two cents.

"Totally." McGee concurred and earned a slap from Abby.

"You're _all_ wrong."

Everybody spun to see Kate standing in the doorway. She looked tired and a little grubby, her arms laden with files and envelopes. Her hair was mussed and she refused to look at Gibbs as she crossed the room to the workbench.

Contrarily, his eyes never left her slim frame. He was wolfish in his intent.

"It's not a suicide note, it's not gibberish and it's not the ravings of a mad man."

Dianne arched an eyebrow, having not missed the way Gibbs was currently visually devouring the other woman.

"Pray tell, my good agent, what _is_ it then?"

"It's a signature." Kate dropped the files onto the desk with a resounding thump and the photographs spilled out messily in glorious gory Technicolor to reveal windows into previous crime scenes.

"The signature of a serial killer. This is only three of the nine cases I've been looking at."

Dianne's brows rose as she looked over the wealth of macabre imagery spread out before her. There must have been nearly a hundred images here, both long distance and close ups. She turned to Gibbs, lips pursed.

"I'm gonna need a bigger wall."


	4. The Thot Plickens

**Yeah, I know, I've been away forever. I eventually had to switch on season two, park myself in front of the tv and STARE at it until I kick started a thought process. **

**So here we are. **

**Remember, reviews are love. **

**Chapter 4: The Thot Plickens**

Kate walked into the conference room and stopped uncertainly at the door when she saw that she was interrupting a phone call.

Special Agent Dianne Caine paced back and forth in the room, threading her fingers through her strawberry blonde hair. She looked up and saw Kate in the doorway. She beckoned her in hastily without breaking her conversation.

"Yes, Hodges…no, Hodges." She nodded even though Hodges couldn't see her. "I can multitask, honey." She tilted her head. "Yes, we did agree that I wouldn't call you that anymore."

Kate hid her smile and toted the box she was carrying over to the only piece of furniture in the room. The conference room had been taken over by one four foot eleven Fed and she was taking no prisoners. Everything bar the long table had been cleared out and crime scene photographs covered every available wall space and a few of them laid out like paving slabs on the carpet.

"It's a favour to a…friend. He needs my expertise and he's not exactly the type to play well with others." Kate couldn't hold back a snort at THAT understatement of the century. "Yes, it's Gibbs…no I do NOT need that analysed for me." Dianne heaved a sigh and tunnelled her fingers through her hair. "Hodges, sometimes I could just…." She made a violent abbreviated movement in the air with her hands. Like she had grabbed something, like a neck, and twisted hard, like until it had snapped. Kate took a little step back.

"Listen, I have to go, Kate's here." She tilted her head and shut her eyes. "Yes, the one that spotted the pattern, no I'm not bringing her to meet you and I'm definitely not going to try and steal her from Gibbs...yeah, well, last time I did something like that he shot me."

Kate jerked at that and shot a look at Dianne. She started when she found the other woman watching her carefully. She signed off from the call and snapped the phone shut.

"Sorry about that. Now, where were we?"

"Uhh…I'm not sure. You asked me up here, you didn't say why."

Dianne blinked at her and appeared to think for a moment.

"That's right!" She cleared her throat and shoved Kate bodily towards the picture covered wall. "Now," she gestured expansively, "tell me what you see."

"A wall."

"Don't be obtuse, sweetie, it's unbecoming."

"What exactly is your specialty again?" Kate narrowed her eyes at the smaller woman.

"Psychology, Anthropology and Behavioural Analysis…with a smattering of some linguistic and FBI stuff in there too." Dianne didn't miss a beat. She grinned broadly at Kate's rather nonplussed expression and waved at the wall again. "Go on, don't be shy, tell me what you're picking up."

"I'm not qualified to…"

"Sure you are!" Dianne gave Kate a one armed hug and rubbed her arm in what was supposed to be a comforting way probably. "Gibbs hand picked you, now that I know you are you, name to face and all that, you gotta be at least passing good at a whole passel of stuff to get even an eyebrow quirk from Ol' Silver Fox."

Kate snickered at the nickname but then straightened her expression at the paranoia that Gibbs would somehow _know._

"Oh, honey, you're not still intimidated by the whole gruff exterior are you? Underneath he's just a big teddy bear."

"Hah!" Kate clapped a hand over her mouth. "Teddy Mare?" She said from behind her fingers.

"You get used to it after the second…no, third time you sleep with him. Now about these letters. They're definitely ancient…"

"Sleep with him?!" Kate squeaked. "Who said we were sleeping together? Was it Tony? It was Tony wasn't it? I'm gonna kill him…you didn't…knoooowww…" Kate trailed off and giggled nervously. High pitched and almost hysterical sounding.

Dianne was standing pointing at her with a wide open mouthed smile on her face and a look of unholy glee. Kate narrowed her eyes again.

"When did _you_ sleep with him?"

"When we were married." Dianne planted a hand on her hip. "Didn't you know?"

Kate's colour dropped five shades.

**$inister $cribe**

"So…" Tony fidgeted with his stapler and eyed Gibbs out of the corner of his eye. His boss was bent to the paper work on his desk and pretending he didn't need those glasses Kate had been going on about.

"No, DiNozzo." Gibbs said without looking up.

"Boss! You don't even know what I was gonna ask yet!"

"No, she is not available. Yes, she is an old friend and -yes- she is so far out of your league you're playing an entirely different sport." Still without looking up.

McGee coughed suspiciously and Tony narrowed his eyes at the probie.

"So…how do you know her?"

"We met at work."

"On a case together?"

"You could say that."

"Same sides of that case?" Tony prodded, treading carefully, he didn't know how long this grace period would last.

"You could say that too." Gibbs allowed.

"What were you…" Tony trailed off when Gibbs lifted his head and gave him a low level Gibbs Glare. "Right, so, work?"

"Work." Gibbs agreed and stood up. He lifted his coffee cup to his mouth and grimaced when he found it empty. Time to stop by the shop and pick up some more. Maybe he should get some for Kate. He faltered at that. This was why Rule 12 existed. No preferential treatment allowed. He sighed and tossed his coffee cup into the trash.

He glanced up at the conference room on the balcony and winced when he saw Dianne and Kate's silhouettes locked in animated conversation.

Nothing good ever came of that.

He definitely needed more coffee.

**Sinister Scribe**

"Married?" Kate glanced out of the conference room window and down at the top of Gibbs' silver head. "You and…?"

"Yup, Gibbs and me in holy matrimony…though holy might be a bit of a strong word." Dianne planted a hand on her hip and shrugged. "Either way, ancient history, I'm MUCH more interested in what _you_ and he are up to after hours."

"That's none of your- -"

"You're right, none of my business, but Gibbs means a lot to me and I've still not decided whether or not you're suitable for him."

"What?!"

"Oh, hush, work now and bitch session later, 'kay?"

Kate opened her mouth and then shut it again. What the hell could she say to that? She heaved in a deep breath, narrowed her eyes at Dianne and then nodded once, sharply.

"Alright."

"Alrighty!" Dianne turned back to the wall and scanned it thoroughly. She rubbed her hands together and hummed in the back of her throat. She slowly looked at Kate out of the corner of her eye. "Anything?"

"It just looks…" She frowned, scanning across the photographs. They were panelled out in chronological order. The oldest cases at one end of the wall working right through to the current case they were on. "Well, there are obvious similarities."

"Like looking at handwriting. Too similar."

"To have been written by so many different people." Kate finished her sentence. "But that's not right, if all of this was written by the victims then…they wouldn't be that similar. They'd have variances."

"Yeah, depending on hand-eye co-ordination, muscle tensing even personality. Everyone should have a definite style to the symbols they've drawn." Dianne rested her hands on her hips.

"So, what does that mean? The killer actually wrote everything? That goes against the evidence. Everything physical we have says that the victims did this." Kate gestured at the wall.

"Oh God."

Kate turned to see Dianne clear across the room. She had one hand over her mouth and she was staring at the wall like it was a holocaust.

"What is it? What's wrong?"

"It's both."

"I don't follow."

"The 'handwriting', the victims fingerprints in their own blood, the evolution of the messy symbols to the much clearer more definite lines."

"The perfection of a serial killer. They get better with every kill. You should have expected this."

"I did." Dianne shook her head. "But not like this." She swallowed hard. "The victims are their own killer. The writing on the walls, it's not gibberish, it's not senseless, in fact quite the opposite. By the time they get to this," she gestured at the wall, the photographs of the victims sprawled under their own bloody handwriting. "By the time they get to this it's the only thing that makes sense."

"What are you saying, that they all went crazy the same way?"

"Yeah, but this is no accident. This was done to them." Dianne's shoulders slumped. "This is programming. The writing is their coding."

"Programming, like…hypnosis?"

"Like, yes, but it's a lot more destructive than that. When this is done to someone, it's like hotwiring their brain. It's changed irreparably. It's called Deep Wiring. The stuff that sleeper agents are made out of. _Disposable_ agents. It's done to captured terrorists. They're put in a room with a seasoned psychologist and reprogrammed. The worst, or best, thing about it is that they don't even know it's happened. In fact, they think that the shrink has failed. That they tried to programme them and failed." She settled back against the wall and looked at the floor. "If it's done right, of course."

"I've never even heard of this."

"You wouldn't have, it's blacker than black Gitmo technically-within-the-Geneva-convention type stuff. After all, all you're doing is sitting in a room talking to them. They're well fed, not harassed or injured. Just talking. When they decide to do whatever you've oh-so-politely asked them to do, it's of their own free will."

"How do you know about this?"

Dianne twisted her lips in a self deprecating smile.

"Who do you think developed the programme?"


	5. No Going Back

**See?**

**Nag incessantly and ye shall receive. **

**Reviews are love. **

**Chapter 5: No Going Back**

Gibbs jogged up the stairs out of the morgue and whistled through his teeth. So far he had managed to successfully avoid the bullpen, and all female occupants contained therein, for most of the afternoon. He had a couple of hours to kill until he could order them home, but so far so good.

"You're avoiding her."

"Gah!" Gibbs missed a step and nearly fell flat on his face. She had snuck up on him. He'd forgotten she could do that. "Jesus, Dianne!" He caught his breath and fought down the fury that her calm presence leaning against the banister incited. She was always so immovable, so implacable and _cheerful _with it. It drove him nuts. "What do you want?"

She took her time answering. She always did when it suited her. She brushed off a barren concrete step and perched there neatly. She offered him a cup of coffee, his fifth of the day, and patted the spot beside her.

"I missed you." She smiled at him and he glowered at her as he took the coffee.

"Liar." He dropped down beside her.

"Yes, fluently and frequently, but not really this time." She smiled a sad kind of smile. "I know you're avoiding us."

"Us?" He wondered if he could act dumb and stall her.

"Kate and I." She gave him a quelling look. No stalling then. "I found out about your fling."

"It wasn't a fling." He denied hotly and her brows shot up. She sipped her coffee with slow deliberation. Letting that statement hang between them.

"Really." She didn't let him answer. "What was it then? I know there's something between you. You care about her, and it's more than a boss/employee thing before you oh-so-gracefully cower behind that excuse." She waggled a finger at him, she really knew him too well. "What's going on with you, Gibbs? This isn't like you. You don't nail women for one night and then cut them off. Hell, it took you three months to work up the courage to bed me!" She slugged back a draught of coffee and Gibbs glowered at her again.

"I was not _afraid_ to bed you."

"Oh yes you were." She snorted. "I'm probably one of the few people alive that can fight you to a standstill, you had no idea what I would do to you when you got naked." She grinned wickedly. "Which is why I think it was so damn spectacular."

He allowed a small smirk at that. Then he sobered.

"What is it, Dianne? You didn't come here to reminisce."

"You miss this? Stairwell talks? We had some of our best conversations in stairwells. I understand you've moved on to elevators now, though." Dianne looked up about herself, her voice echoing in the lofty hallway they sat in.

"Is this about what you did, Dianne?"

"No." She sighed. "No. I can't bring myself to apologise for that. This is about something else I've done. The reason I came to find you is because I didn't want Kate to find you first. I thought I should be the one to tell you this time."

"Dianne, what the hell are you talking about?"

"Remember the real reason we divorced? It wasn't because we didn't love each other anymore, we still do I think. It's just that, you couldn't love me the same way after what I'd done…this is just another part of that."

"Aw, hell." Gibbs knocked back some coffee, he had the feeling he was going to need another cup.

"People are dying, Jethro, and I'm responsible."

Gibbs didn't waste time denying it for her. She wouldn't say something like this unless she meant it. He just wanted to know how bad it was.

"Something I did in the Company, Jethro. Something in the wake of 9/11. Head Office wanted results. The country was in a mess, everybody was screaming at everybody else to make somebody pay and…I allowed myself to be railroaded into…unleashing something awful."

"What kind of awful?"

Dianne explained Deep Programming. She told him how it was the perfect weapon, how she had dreamt it up in college and how the CIA had found a use for it in the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack on American soil. How she had sat in a dozen rooms with a dozen captured extremists and turned them into fanatics that would suicide bomb their own people. She couldn't look at him while she said it. Couldn't bear to see that look of disappointment on his face.

Again.

"So, you think this programming is being used on our victims? That they're essentially their own murderers? How the hell do we convict that?"

"You don't."

"What?"

"Gibbs, this was _designed_ to be untraceable. There is NO way to tell who did the programming, where or why. The only way to do it would be to catch one of the victims before they go 'Jackson Pollock in his red period' and try and deconstruct what's going on in their fractured minds and THAT would probably kill them too." Dianne let her head drop into her hand. "There's no way out of this, Gibbs. I'm sorry, you can't catch this killer."

"There has to be a way, I…"

"NO, Gibbs!" She looked up at him finally. "No amount of stubbornness or sheer cussedness is going to get you through this one. There are no rules one-through-sixteen for this case. This is unlike anything you've ever come across. I designed the programme to be foolproof and I do NOT fail."

"So, what? I just give up?"

"Yes. You do."

"And do what?"

"You leave it to me."

Gibbs opened his mouth then shut it on a growl.

"You're not one of them anymore."

"You never _really_ stop, Gibbs."

"Damnit, Dianne!" He surged to his feet and tossed his coffee cup. It splattered against the wall and then clunked across the floor. They both watched it roll across the landing and then trip down the stairs.

"I've never asked you for anything, Gibbs. I'm asking for this. I'm asking for you to step back and let me handle this."

"Can't do that, Dianne."

"Why not?"

"Because I won't let you go there!" He threw himself down on the stairs beside her again. "I won't let you go back to being that…machine. You're happy in BAU, you like the people you work with. They like you. You have to lose all that if you go back to…cleaning house."

"It's necessary." Her voice already sounded hollow, she was already shutting down.

"Dianne, don't do this." He wrapped her cool hand in his much larger warmer one. "We can figure out a different way. You don't have to…"

They both looked up when the door to the stairwell opened and Kate walked through it. She looked up to see them on the stairwell, sat hip to hip, Dianne's hand in his.

"Oh." She murmured. Her colour paled out and she swallowed hard. "Uh…there you are." She seemed to flounder for a moment and Dianne pulled her hand from Gibbs'.

"What is it, Kate?" He fidgeted a moment, wondering what the hell to do with his hands now. Putting them anywhere else put them closer or around Dianne and he didn't want Kate to get the wrong idea…

Damnit! Why did they have to have slept together (though he was pretty sure there hadn't been much of any actual sleeping going on)? It just made the slightest little thing a hundred times more complex.

"Uh, nothing that can't wait. You two are obviously involved, I mean, with each other, I mean…" She forced herself to stop from verbally tripping up and started again. She clenched her hand and flexed it, then did it again and again. "You're obviously busy. It can wait."

She turned around and slipped back out of the heavy fire door.

"Kate!" Gibbs called after her but she didn't come back. He sighed with a growl. "Aw, hell." He looked at Dianne and tried to figure out which one of the women in his life to deal with first. They were both running from him, just in different ways.

Dianne solved the problem for him.

"You know, I think I will stick around. Help you with this case."

"Really?" Gibbs smiled at her. That was good…he thought.

Maybe.

"Yeah, really." Dianne was frowning at the door that Kate had just disappeared through.

"Why?" Not that he wasn't glad, but Dianne never changed her mind without a damn good reason.

"Because I just saw something veerrrrrry interesting." She passed her half empty coffee cup to him, rose to her feet, dusted herself off and moseyed for the door.

"What did you see?"

"Don't know yet. Don't think I'm going to like it when I find out though."

The door swung shut behind her and Gibbs was left in an empty stairwell.

"Great." He said to the empty space and took a swig from his cup.

"I'll just wait here then."


	6. An Even Stranger Stranger

**Meh, I'm not sure about this chapter in the slightest. **

**However, considering everyone thinks that I've either a) died off and will never complete my fictions or b) have just decided to bugger off and do better things with my time (which is not completely off the mark), I thought that I should at least update SOMETHING. **

**So here we are. Reviews are love and Susan is not as much of a bitch as she first appears. Her first impression's have always sucked. **

**Enjoy. **

**Chapter 6 – An Even Stranger Stranger**

She was beginning to hate the wall.

The wall in the conference room where Diane had set up shop. More photographs were added to it each day. More blood. More letters. More death.

Diane had Kate stare at it for hours. Picking away at her, prying information from her, needling her, pushing her to say things she didn't even know were true. Most of the time she just guessed to keep Diane happy. She had a dangerous kind of vibrancy to her. She had become focussed. Intense. There was a concentrated energy in her, so distilled it seemed almost violent. Like lethality waiting to boil over…and all of it was focussed on Kate.

Kate would turn around and find Diane standing _right_ behind her, fingers tapping on her lips, a look of fierce concentration on her face. When Kate asked her what was wrong, Diane would straighten, put that little smile on her face and shake her head. Nothing. Nothing was wrong at all.

Kate was beginning to understand why Gibbs and the tiny dynamo had been together. She hadn't thought that the sunny little Diane would have been a match for Gibbs. Looked like she was wrong.

Kate closed her eyes, both against the wall and her thoughts. She didn't want to think about Diane and Gibbs getting closer. Didn't want to think about her boss at all.

A bleating phone made her jump and she opened her eyes, turning to see Diane pulling her slimline cell from her pants' pocket and clapping it to her ear.

"Susan. That was fast." She was silent a moment as she listened and then her brows flew up. "You're stateside already?" Her lips parted in a little gape of surprise. "No. I didn't know you owned a Concorde. I thought they had been decommissioned." She rubbed a hand over her eyes. "Yeah, I suppose having stock in the company does have its advantages."

Kate arched a brow and Diane shrugged at her.

"Where are you now?"

The door kicked open and a woman about Kate's height filled the doorway. She was curvy, but strong looking under her designer clothes. She had wild corkscrew curls, coffee, chocolate and whiskey, tumbling down her back to her waist. Her skin was flawless porcelain and her features arranged more striking than truly pretty. She was young. Very young, couldn't have been more than twenty five. On the outside.

"Right here." She spoke with a rolling Celtic brogue and clipped her phone closed. She smiled and spread her hands. "Hello, Diane."

"Susan!" Diane clapped her own phone shut and crossed to Susan. She hugged her warmly, a gesture that Susan didn't seem entirely comfortable with. and stepped back. "I am so glad to see you."

Susan glanced up at the wall and seemed to take a moment and all of it in. She stepped away from Dianne and crossed the room to regard the evidence. She was quiet a long moment and Dianne took the opportunity to make introductions.

"Kate this is Doctor Susan Seer, she's a friend and she's here to help us with the case. Susan, this is Special NCIS Agent Caitlin Todd."

"Pleasure." Kate held out her hand and Susan took it absently before dragging her attention away from the wall and looking at Kate. She sucked in a breath, her pupils dilated and she went very still.

"Oh, don't say anything you might regret." She said slowly. She settled her other hand over hers and Kate's and her flint eyes bored into Kate's. Kate shifted uncomfortably she wanted to look away, look at Diane for a clue as to what the hell was going on, but she couldn't. Susan stepped closer to her, tugging harshly, pulling Kate right in close until they were practically chest to chest. She looked into Kate deeper, harsher, pushing.

Kate made a strangled sound in the back of her throat and tried to pull away. She jerked when she couldn't move more than an inch.

"Just relax. Breathe into it." Susan murmured and Kate was trapped in those eyes.

They weren't black, not really, not this close. They were more of a shining slate grey with flecks of silver, purple and cobalt streaking the iris. They were entrancing. Electricity skated up and down Kate's arm from where their hands touched. She felt herself grow heavy, languorous.

She tried to fight it. Desperately tried to regain control, but she was being pushed down effortlessly. She tried so hard to get around it. This felt too familiar. Frightening. She'd been here before. She hadn't liked it then and she didn't like it now. It had been painful.

Kate's pulse kicked up a notch. No. She didn't want this. Not again. She didn't like it. Make it go away. She tried to fight but this wasn't something that she could take out with a sneaky Secret Service move. She couldn't even touch it. The feeling was nasty. Cloying like a bad smell that put fur on her tongue. Her chest started to heave, her temperature rose a few degrees until sweat slicked her brow and she began to tremble.

"Enough." Susan stepped away and released her.

Kate sagged forward, catching herself on her knees. Her chest heaved and she wished she had her gun.

"Shooting me would not help you, agent Todd," Susan quietly spoke, "but I am the only one that can." Her tone turned to something much heavier as she spoke to Diane. "You were right."

"Right about what?" Kate very slowly sat down on the floor. She thought it better to do that than fall down. "What the hell did you do to me?"

"A complex diagnostic procedure." Susan dismissed it. "I could kill my sister…if I knew where she was." She spun away and glared at the wall again.

"You still haven't found Olivia?"

"I haven't been looking." Susan snapped at her and Diane bit her lip and seemed to get even smaller. Kate's brows rose. Someone had managed to cow Diane, that was quite something. "She disappeared shortly after she taught you her little parlour trick. I'm so glad that you managed to bastardise it so beautifully."

Diane said nothing as Susan attacked her verbally. She rained disdain down on her like hell's angel with brimstone.

"What? No defence? No false remorse? Do you even feel shame for what you've done?"

"Don't try that high and mighty bullshit with me, Susan. You knew what was going on with Olivia and you did nothing. You let her teach me." Diane's spine reasserted itself with a vengeance.

"I let her stay with a friend to help her through her difficult marriage!" Susan rounded on Diane so fiercely that Kate thought she was going to hit her. "I was a fool to think you wouldn't have used her the way you'd wanted to since you found out what she could do. You're all the same!"

"Hey! I was her friend. I was better to her than you ever were."

"She chose to leave us. Twice."

"Children." Kate said suddenly, labouring back to her feet and reaching for a bottle of water. "Would either of you mind shutting up for a second and telling me what the hell has been done to me?"

Susan and Diane fumed silently for a moment and then Susan turned to her when Diane looked away.

"You know Diane's hypnosis trick? The one used to turn terrorists against their own cells?"

"Yeah." Kate said slowly, she had a rather sickening feeling as to where this was going. "Deep Programming, right?"

"Clever girl." Susan drawled. "You've just become its latest victim."

Kate's mouth dropped open and she looked to Diane to deny it. To please, please, please deny it. Diane finally looked up at her and Kate felt her stomach plummet past her shoes. Her next words were damning.

"I am so sorry, Kate."

**$inister $cribe**

"Ducky!"

Ducky jolted from his perusal of the latest body to grace his table and spun at the familiar voice.

"Susan?" His face split in a grin when he realised he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing. "My dear, child, what brings you to this side of the pond?" He embraced her warmly.

"A wicked business. Unfortunately." Susan held him at arms length and looked him up and down. "You look well."

"Flatterer." He grinned at her. "How is your mother?"

"She wanted to be here, but you know dad, he forbid it."

"The old dog never could stand the competition." Ducky sniffed and Susan laughed at him and then let the chuckle die away when her eyes fell to the body on the table. She looked saddened more than anything else. Ducky realised what exactly the wicked business was. "Diane called you in to help."

"I hope you don't see it as a poor reflection on yourself." Susan looked up to Ducky. Both figuratively and literally. He had been one of her professors in University. Her father had rewarded him handsomely for crossing the divide between Glasgow and Edinburgh, only the best for his little girl, but Ducky had returned the money, deigning not to take it, especially when Susan had turned out to be such an apt student. The best in her class for reasons he still couldn't quite fathom.

Certainly, Susan was a capable and intelligent woman, but her insights were often impossible to backwards engineer. She dismissed it as instinct, but she made Gibbs' infamous gut feeling look like hazardous guesses. Susan Knew things. She always Knew and she was damn near impossible to lie to. Ducky knew that there was something special about her. Something that he could not explain. Nevertheless, he had not asked her about it and would not in the future, if she wanted him to know, she would tell him.

"You wish to borrow my facilities I presume."

"You know how I am, Ducky. I like to rule over my little kingdom." Susan smiled at him. "I hope you have plenty of room. I had the rest of the bodies exhumed. They're on their way now."

"How did you manage that?"

Susan and Ducky turned to the voice in the doorway. Susan arched a brow and looked at the man. He was tall, built solidly rather than massively. He had a military cut though his hair was silver and his eyes were a pale glacial blue.

He did not look happy to see her.

"Jethro, this is Susan Seer, one of my students from my days as a Professor. Diane called her in to assist the case. Susan, this is Lieutenant Leroy Jethro Gibbs."

Susan did not extend her hand in greeting but then, neither did Gibbs.

"You didn't answer my question." Gibbs told her, though he was sure she was fully aware.

"No need to get territorial, Gunny." Susan told him on an enigmatic smile. "I am only here to clean up after Diane's mess."

"This is not her fault." Gibbs frowned fiercely at her and stalked closer.

"Of course it is, though my own family is not without blame, I am here for reparation's sake. I'm sure I could leave you and your damaged agent to your own devices but I do not think it would bode well for her health or that of future victims."

"What do you mean?" Gibbs narrowed his eyes at her. He didn't like her. He was getting really weird vibrations off her and his gut had up and freeze dried itself in her presence. She set him off like nails over a chalkboard.

"She hasn't told you? Interesting." Susan murmured. She tossed her head, sending her hair flowing down her back. "Agent Kate has come into contact with your killer. He's gotten into her head."

"What?" Gibbs went hyper still and he felt the colour drain from his face. "What does that mean?"

Susan blinked at him, thinking the answer to that question was obvious.

"It means that the nutter can do that to her." She pointed behind her at the gutted body of the young navy officer. "Unless you let me help you."

"What do you need to know?" Gibbs thought he was going to be sick. This couldn't be happening. Someone could NOT have gotten to Kate. What were the chances? Far too damn likely in his experience. Gibbs swallowed and it was the only outward appearance of his turmoil. Inside he was screaming, he wanted to murder someone, but on the outside he looked like he always did.

Pissed.

"Everything." Susan nodded to the table. "I'll need to wait for the rest of the bodies to arrive, but I can work with your team until then. I need to examine every one of them for signs of psychological trauma. This sort of thing does not go unmarked and I need someone to get me up to speed on the case so far. What you know and what you're questions are. I will take the lead from there."

"You are not in charge of this investigation." Gibbs told her sharply. "You've got neither the authority nor the expertise for it. What kind of doctor are you?"

"How many different kinds of doctor do you know?" Susan said in quietly lethal tone. She laid it out for him like it was. "Agent Gibbs, this is serious. I am the only person capable of combating this with the hope of getting Kate out of it alive. If I do nothing, she dies. Horribly. Like this." She held up the colour photographs of previous crime scenes in her hands and waved at the body behind her again.

"You're only hope is for you to let me guide you. I have no desire to take credit, but I have every investment in having this monster caught and destroyed. I believe I can trust you to do that." She straightened and looked him right in the eye. "Can you do that?"

"Kill the bastard that hurt Kate?" Gibbs said after a long moment. He turned back to Susan, a wolfish look on his face. "Lady, you point him out to me and I'll bring you his head on a silver platter."

Susan's smile was nothing but feline sociopathy.

"Good."


	7. Diagnosis Complete

**One chapter, finito. **

**Aaaannd, the next one's nearly finished too. Shock - horror, I know. **

**Yay for Hotch! This time the name is spelled correctly, lol. I'm still trying to write a fecking Criminal Minds fic and I have honestly, written about five openings for different stories and I can't get beyond that!**

***frustrated* **

**Anyways, plot ahoy, this is for all you people who tried to wait patiently for me to get my finger out and get this done and failed miserably. **

**Enjoy. **

**Chapter 7 - Diagnosis Complete**

"Ye gods, what a day." Susan fell back into the chair that she had commandeered in Ducky's office and rubbed her eyes. She was knackered.

When she hadn't been elbow deep in cadavers in the morgue she had been up to her sixth sense in interviews with the team. She had gone through everybody bar the boss. Agent Gibbs seemed to be willing to put up with her and, while she should be thankful for small mercies, she needed him in here where she could get a solid look at him.

He wasn't playing ball.

Susan rubbed at her pounding temples and reached into her pocket. She pulled out a white capped orange bottle and shook two heavy pills out into her hand. She swallowed them washed down with a grimace and cold tea. She mulled it over then shook out two more and downed those too.

"What are those?"

Susan flinched so hard that she slopped tea over her skirt and swore explosively. She looked up, flint eyes flashing, and her temper stopped cold when she saw the long lean man in the doorway. She looked back down at her skirt and swiped at it ineffectively to hide her surprise.

"Aaron." She tried to gather herself but she was tired, scattered, and she didn't know if she could deal with him right now.

"Answer me."

"Who let you in?" She looked up at him and searched for tissues.

"The badge." Special Supervisory Agent Aaron Hotchner stepped deeper into the room and closed the door with a quiet click behind him. Dianne's boss. "What are you taking?"

"They're migraine tablets." Susan snapped and shoved the bottle at him. "They're even prescribed by someone else. No need to worry."

"Aside from the fact that you need migraine tablets." Hotch dropped his jacket over the chair on the other side of the desk. He glanced around the room. "Looks just like home."

"Actually, my office looks like this one. It belongs to my tutor from medical school." Susan smiled tightly and took the pill bottle back, shaking it into her pocket. "Why are you here?"

"To see you." Hotch sat down opposite her and his ebony eyes bored into hers. She looked away first. "You're avoiding me."

"I live across an ocean. It's not so much avoidance as it is geographical positioning." She gave up on her skirt and sat back in her chair, lacing her fingers together across her stomach and folded one leg over the other. She smiled tightly. "How's the wife and child?"

"Jack's great." Hotch's smile changed his entire face. Made him look ten years younger and genuinely happy. The smile dropped away just as quickly though. "Haley's divorced."

"Hah!" Susan, who had been in the process of drinking her cold tea, spluttered and caught herself just before she choked. She looked at him. "I mean…what a pity. My sympathies in your trying time." She turned away so he couldn't see her smile and only turned back when she was sure she could maintain a straight face.

"You never did like her."

"Ah, no, untrue." Susan held up a finger to disagree with him. Her cup was empty and she glanced around for something to drink. Those bloody tablets gave her the worst case of dry mouth. "_She_ never liked _me._ I had no problem with her until she started being a moron."

"I'm worried about you." Hotch said quietly. "Dianne said…"

"Dianne should have had the stupid slapped clean out of her." Susan snapped. She stood and moved to the door. Hotch followed after her without missing a beat. "I swear to God, if I'm not cleaning up after Olivia's messes then I'm dealing with hers." She rounded on him suddenly, nearly causing him to walk into her. "You never told anyone, did you? About…the family business."

"Of course not!" Hotch looked insulted and she nodded, turning away and scrunching her hair again.

"I know, I know, sorry for asking but…"

"Olivia left a helluva mess behind her."

"I need to be sure. There is a reason that we don't tell people. THIS is the kind of fallout that happens when my family's business becomes public knowledge. I cannot allow this to continue." She made for the vending machine and rattled the money in her pocket. She slapped the machine when she found only British coin.

"What are you talking about?" Hotch stepped in closer to her and fed money into the machine jamming the button for a can of her favourite drink. "What are you planning?"

"I'm the eldest. It's my responsibility to protect my household."

"Susan," Hotch's hand encircled Susan's arm and tugged her around to face her. "Are you saying what I hope you're not saying?"

"That I need no more witnesses?" Susan arched a brow at him. "Dianne has crossed the line."

"And you're going to punish her for it?"

"If need be." Susan popped the top of the can and took a long drink.

"Susan, when you're within State lines, you're in my jurisdiction. If I have to lock you in a damn cell to save you from yourself then I will." Hotch's intensity was only matched by Susan's own. She tilted her head at him and got that dangerous look in her eye.

"What could possibly make you think that you could contain me?" Susan growled back at him.

"I am your friend. I don't want to lose you because of something that your sister has done. Dianne can be trusted, she's worked with my team, there are other ways." He tugged on her arm and brought her closer to him so that they were nearly chest to chest. "Please. Don't do this. For me."

Susan opened her mouth and then clapped it shut, looking away from him. Her eyes dropped to the floor and she pitched forward a little, her forehead coming to rest against his chest.

"Damn you, Aaron." She mumbled into his shirt. "I have to stop this."

"You will. You're just going to do it the right way." Hotch wrapped his arm around her shoulders. "Where are you staying?"

"I haven't decided yet."

"Then you're staying with me." He decided for her. He felt her move to protest and spoke before she could. "You need a familiar place right now. You're staying with me. There's plenty of room."

"In what way is that a good idea?" She snapped at him and he rocked back on his heels, surprised. He frowned and she shook her head. "Sorry, I thought I was talking to somebody else."

"Susan, I think you should come home with me. Now." Hotch reached up and stroked her hair back away from her face.

She looked tired. She looked a lot older than she really was. He was worried about her. Susan was supposed to be filled with life, laughing and joking and teasing him. Not announcing that she was considering murder to keep somebody quiet. The worst thing was, that he knew that she was fully capable of it. Not only that, but she was capable of getting away with it because he wouldn't be able to prove anything.

"I still have work to do." She gestured at the bullpen. "Gibbs, the boss, he's being difficult and I still need to…I need to…" Susan rubbed at her forehead and squeezed her eyes shut. "Everyone else has come up clean for signs of 'Deep Programming', it's unusual for only one person to be, uh, dosed with it. It's only good practice to have a back up if the first fails. So if everyone else is clean and the target is the NCIS team then it only follows that…"

"That Agent Gibbs is the most probable candidate. You think that the target is the NCIS team itself?"

"I think that a team this good, a team with a capture conviction rate that is unparalleled throughout their entire department, would be the best target to destabilise the entire NCIS. Make them doubt themselves. Burn their standard, as it were."

"So, the only way you're going to go home and rest is if you talk to this Gibbs person?" Hotch planted his hands on his hips.

"I would like to see if he's been programmed into being a mass murdering and/or suicidal robot, yes." Susan smirked at him.

"Well, let's go find him." Hotch took her arm and steered her towards the bullpen.

"Oh?" Susan trotted after him. "Are you going to get all Alpha Male and demand that he pay heed to my petty demands?"

"If need be." Hotch ground out. He hadn't even met the man and he already wanted to pistol whip him. Stubborn jackass. What kind of moron puts his own pride over the wellbeing of his team?

"Well, the only way I'm going to allow that is if you both go shirtless and let me smother you in baby oil."

Hotch's step hitched at that and he glanced at her with narrowed eyes.

"I told you, that was a one time only thing."

"A girl can dream." Susan shrugged.

"Where is Agent Gibbs?" Hotch demanded of the ex-cop lounging behind his desk.

"Depends on who's askin'?"

"Special Supervisory Agent Aaron Hotchner." Hotch flipped his ID at the man and realised it was a mistake the moment his face went carefully blank and an aura of hostility settled over him. Hotch resisted the urge to growl. He didn't have time for an inter-departmental pissing contest. "Doctor Seer needs to speak with him."

"Ooh, Susan, good to see you again." He sat forward, grinning broadly.

"Tony." Susan smiled cordially at him and Hotch wanted to punch Tony's perfect white teeth straight down his neck. "Where is Gibbs. It's important that I talk with him."

"Like you did with us? You think he might be…" Tony waggled his fingers as if to illustrate and Hotch fought the urge to roll his eyes.

"I think I need to talk to him to find out." Susan glanced around the bullpen at Gibbs' desk. It was empty, the computer shut down, she looked to Kate's which was in a similar state of abandonment. She whirled back to Tony. "He took Kate home. Didn't he?"

"Uh, yeah, Kate was upset so Gibbs decided to take her back to her apartment." Tony faltered when he saw the expression on Susan's face. "Is that bad?"

"Are you mentally deficient?" Susan snapped at him. "She's an ex-Secret Service agent who's been programmed by a hypnotist serial killer and she's alone with a man who thinks she would never harm him. You're right, what could possibly be bad about that?"

"Hey, Kate's not a danger to Gibbs, he's a marine, you know, he could take her if he wanted to." Tony shrugged.

"Where does she live?" Susan demanded of Tony and then rounded on Hotch. "You'd better warm up that siren, sweetheart, we've got places to be."

**$inister $cribe**

"Here we are." Gibbs opened the door and ushered Kate inside.

"Great." Kate rubbed at her arms and hugged herself. She didn't want to be here. She wanted to be in her apartment. She wanted to be on her couch, with her cushions, her chocolate, her comfort movies and her ice cream. She didn't want to be in this Spartan, utilitarian cave that Gibbs called his home. "Why are we here?"

"I wanted to talk to you." He shrugged off his jacket and pulled her from hers. He hung them both up on the hooks by the door and hustled her deeper into the house. Herding her towards the kitchen. "You want some coffee?"

"No. I'm all caffiened out." Kate took the stool that was offered to her and huddled herself closer to the granite breakfast bar. She watched him move about the kitchen. "You didn't answer my question."

"What?"

"Why are we here? You told me you were going to take me home."

"I will." He nodded and busied himself with the coffee machine. "I just want to talk to you first."

"Here? In your home?" Kate shook her head and gave a bitter laugh. "Good God, Gibbs, could you at least pretend that you're concerned about me enough to put my comfort over your need for control?"

Gibbs glanced up at her.

"I mean, I'm barely holding it together, I just want to go home and fall apart and cry into a tub of ice cream or something, but no! I have to come here and pander to your alpha male need to show that despite everything you're still in charge. That you're still in control." Her voice was bitter and she finally looked away from him. She looked fit to spit.

"Where did all that come from?" Gibbs finally found his words.

"Profiler, remember?" Kate snapped at him.

"I just wanted to say that I…I'm not going to let this thing get you. I'm going to make sure that you're okay. I…"

"I swear to God, you say 'I' one more time, and I'll shoot you." Kate growled at him. "This is about _me_, okay? This has happened to ME. I've just found out that some psycho has programmed me to kill myself right after I drive myself insane! I'm Catholic, Gibbs, do you even know what that kind of thing means? And all you can say is that you won't let this happen?" She slammed her hand on the counter top with a clap of sound. "It already happened, Gibbs, and there's nothing you can do about it."

Kate shoved herself away from the stool and stalked away from him. She moved around the room restlessly and Gibbs let her. His hand had tightened so hard on his mug that it had cracked. He carefully put it into the sink and shook the hot coffee from his hand before he methodically set about making another cup.

"Katy, I know you're scared, but you've got to keep it together." Gibbs spoke to her back. "About, the other night…we have to look at the possibility that our lapse in memory and this thing that happened to you are connected."

"I would never have guessed that." Kate drawled.

"But we can't let it get in the way of catching this guy, making him talk, telling us how to fix you." He braced his arms against the counter top and tried to ignore how much he sucked at this. He was a Marine. He was supposed to be good at everything but the Corps had never prepared him for a situation quite like this. "Kate, you're our best chance of doing that. You can profile this bastard and, WHEN we catch him, I'll make him talk."

"So glad my fate rests in such capable hands." Kate muttered as she prowled around his living room. Ticking off the details in her head. Open plan living area leading directly onto the dining area with the kitchen on the other side of the serving hatch. An old design, circa 1950's, Gibbs hadn't modernised. Well, he wouldn't.

"I'm just saying…this isn't a death sentence." Gibbs was still trying to get through to her and she didn't seem to be taking any of it in. He resisted the urge to grind his teeth together and drank some of his coffee instead. The woman was damn difficult at times. He scowled at the back of her head and ignored the trembling wobbly thing in his chest which shook with abject terror at the thought of losing her. This whole, memory but not sensory blackout thing that had gone on between them was bad. Very, very, very bad.

She was a member of his team. That should be it. End of. But no. Now that he apparently knew her on a biblical level, it made things a lot more complicated. _Feelings_ were involved. Feelings that he'd much rather leave well enough alone and buried. Way, way, deep, deep, down where they couldn't cause any trouble other than keeping him awake on some long lonely nights.

"You're going to be alright, Kate." He spoke so as to distract himself. "Dianne's good at what she does. She'll help us." Gibbs was so absorbed in staring into his coffee that he didn't notice the way Kate had stopped by the mantelpiece.

She went completely still, then her head lolled for a moment as if she was dizzy. Her hand clenched and flexed. Once, twice, three times and then, when she straightened, Caitlin Todd as Gibbs knew her wasn't home anymore.

Gibbs had sunk into silence, swirling his coffee and hoping this was one of those times where the simple presence of another person was enough to be of comfort. He was good at the stoic silent thing. He was good at standing there while women railed at him and then stormed off wondering why he wouldn't _talk_ to them.

Surprise, surprise, Gibbs wasn't much for talking when he could be doing. Doing was always better. Doing could also be a lot more pleasurable.

On the heels of that thought his glacial eyes scooted up of their own accord to look at Kate. He went completely still when he saw her standing in the middle of the room _staring_ at him.

"Katy?" Gibbs straightened away from the worktop and set his mug down, forgetting about the brew. He rounded the counter and was disconcerted by the way she turned her head to watch his every move. That was the only part of her that moved, when he stopped hesitantly in front of her, he saw that she was barely even breathing. Her usually warm cinnamon eyes were burning with an intensity that he'd never seen before. She looked him up and down and something _predatory_ overtook her.

"Kate, you okay?" Gibbs frowned and reached out slowly to her.

What happened next was fast enough to let him know that she had been holding back every time she had sparred with him in the gym.

She grabbed his wrist with both hands and spun. He had already been leaning forward towards her and she jammed her hip into his, shifting his centre of balance about two feet away from where he thought it should be and tossed him around as easily as she would one of her crocheted throw pillows.

Gibbs would later deny that the sound he had made was anything but a manly utterance of surprise but it sounded a lot like a yelp as he was spun over his arm and thrown violently into a dining chair.

She scooted around him, something cold snapped around his wrist, threaded through the slats at the back of the chair and clapped around his opposite wrist. Gibbs jerked hard enough to make his shoulders scream when he realised she had just cuffed him. To the chair.

Oh boy.

"Kate, what the hell do you think you're doing?" He tried not to yell at her. Today had been a tough day for her, but the knowledge that she not only could, but had, immobilised him without breaking a sweat went a long way to stretching his temper to breaking point.

"Taking control." She chuckled deep in her throat and Gibbs went very still at that voice. That didn't sound like his Katy. That sounded like someone completely different. All rolling R's and sardonic smirks and a husky straight sex voice that tingled down his body and had him struggling to remember to be mad at her.

"Uh, okay." Gibbs swallowed hard as she stalked around him, her heels clicking ominously against the hardwood floor. The smallest of smiles curled her mouth as she looked him over and Gibbs felt a trickle of unease drip icy down his spine when she reached up and shrugged her jacket from her shoulders, placing it over the back of another chair with exaggerated care. It occurred to him right then that he was completely at the mercy of a woman who was armed, dangerous and had recently had her subconscious fucked with by a hypnotist sociopath.

"You made your point, you can let me go now."

She laughed then and it did nothing to comfort him.

"Oh no, Jethrrrro." She purred out his name and prowled over to the kitchen work surface…and the very large knife rack there. Gibbs let nothing in his manner betray how he was imagining exactly how much damage little Katy Todd might be able to do with one of those very large and very sharp knives. Gibbs maintained them well, he looked after all his tools.

Fuck.

Kate pursed her lips as her fingers danced over the knife block. She hummed in her throat as she pulled out one, discarded it, did the same for another and then settled on the third. It made a zinging rasping sound as she pulled it from the block. She turned to him then and Gibbs could see the white of her sharp smile reflected on the gleaming blade.

Okay, Gunny, don't panic. She's still your Kate, you just have to get through to her. Gibbs frantically tried to reason with himself while maintaining his calms façade. He'd never shown fear in the Gulf, he wasn't about to start in his own kitchen. Besides, it's not the biggest knife. She picked one of the smaller ones. Maybe she's fed up with your haircut and has decided to do something about it…yeah, and maybe he was going to sprout wings out of his ass and volunteer for a desk job.

"Katy, how about you put down the knife? I'll do anything you want, just tell me what you need." His voice was low and his tone (he hoped) was reasoning. He didn't do reasoning very well. Marines weren't really known for their diplomacy.

"Need." She chuckled again. "Good word choice." She tipped the knife against her finger and toyed with the point. "It's strange, you know, like…a door opened to something I never knew I was missing before." She smiled almost dreamily and circled him lazily.

Gibbs didn't twitch and try to follow her movement. He just stayed still and hoped that she didn't get slash happy.

"What do you want, Kate? Tell me. We'll work something out."

"What do I want?" Kate murmured to herself and tilted her head back to regard the ceiling fan as if it might answer her. "What do I waaaaannnt…? Interesting question." She turned then, fast enough to make him flinch and the knife was resting point first against his chin. He made like a statue. "I would have thought it was obvious."

"Let's pretend it isn't." Gibbs spoke quietly and carefully. That knife was a little too close to his jugular

Kate smiled then, looking almost like herself again and stepped forward. She dropped down onto his lap, straddling him and looped one arm around his shoulders in a friendly sort of way.

"I want you and I," she gestured between them with the knife, "to have some fun."

"Fun?" Gibbs swallowed as she absently ran the knife along his jaw line. It was sharp enough to scrape at the five o'clock shadow he had going on. "What kind of fun?"

"Oh, the best kind." Kate sat forward and the knife trailed from his jaw down over his neck to rest at his pulse. She smiled then, all white teeth and glazed eyes.

"The _messy_ kind."


	8. Oh My

**Hai thar!**

**Whee, finally sat down and finished this one. I was suffering my usual bout of insomnia last night and that incidentally gives me a lot of spare time to do various bits of plot for the projects I'm working on (aside from the novel, which is not going well and I'm ready to start chewing on the desk because of it -sigh). **

**Anyways, bit of foreshadowing for a Criminal Minds fic that may or may not happen in the near future. **

**And some Kibbs. **

**Enjoy and review. **

**Chapter 8 - Oh My...**

"What…" Gibbs licked his lips and looked at Kate warily, she was regarding him with a thoughtful expression on her face. At least it wasn't murderous. "What kind of messy?"

"Hmmmm…" Kate scooted closer to him still. Her arm slung around his neck, her fingers toying with his hair. Her other hand was holding the knife against his chin with a careful tapping that had him intensely aware of every inch of exposed skin. "I think that it's time you and I…or rather just you, admitted how you feel about…this." She waved the knife in a random motion that wasn't at all helpful in clarifying matters.

"This?"

"You seem slow tonight, Jethrrro, is something distracting you?" She smiled sweetly and shifted her seat on him a little too deliberately.

Gibbs grunted when she deepened her straddle of him.

Right over his cock.

"Kate…" He started in a warning tone and she scowled at him, trailing the knife point over his collarbone.

"Don't 'Kate' me." She flicked the top button of his shirt off with a contemptuous motion from the knife. "We're not at work. You're not the boss of me. Not here." She grinned slowly. "Not now."

"You gotta go back to work sometime." He pointed out as levelly as he could while trying to convince Southern regions not to go to Phase 2. Now was decidedly not the time for his body to be noticing that Caitlin Todd was planted on his lap…it would seem his cock didn't care that she was intent on skinning him alive.

"That is true…but what I do out of work is entirely up to me." She grinned again and another button was clipped from his shirt.

"Alright, fine, I can't control you. Happy now? It's all in your hands." He raised his brows at her. "Now what? You going to gut me like Johansson?"

"Gut you?" Kate blinked at him. Then she threw her head back and laughed. "Jethrrro, honey, of all the things we have done and will do together, evisceration ain't gonna be one of them."

"Well, then why have you tied me up?"

Kate's smile was practically feline as she gripped his shoulders with a bite from her nails then very slowly and very deliberately ground her pelvis down against his.

"Oh." He choked out. He felt momentarily stupid for believing that she could ever bring herself to kill him, even in her hypnotised state. She just wasn't that kind of person. Not to kill in cold blood. He knew her perfectly capable of taking a life but…but…but she was doing something very interesting with that hip roll of hers.

"Kate, stop it." He tried to inject some authority into his voice and he was rewarded with a derisive snort.

"Don't think so, Jethrrrro." She purred his name and set to slicing his shirt to ribbons. She was a little too dexterous with that knife for his peace of mind and he should really do something about her Southern trajectory there.

"You're not yourself. You're going to be embarrassed when you come to your senses."

"Oh, I plan on using _all_ my senses." She smirked at him and her lips brushed his when she leaned forward to peel his ruined shirt from his body. "I plan on coming too."

"Uh…" Gibbs had no witty reply for that. Most of his blood was making for his little head and it didn't leave much left to power anything else. He licked his lips and jerked in surprise when she licked them too.

"Oh, don't you pretend you didn't like that." She wriggled on his lap again and Gibbs couldn't hold back his groan when the movement connected up with all the right dots. "I know exactly what you want and exactly _how_ you want it."

Gibbs strained against the handcuffs pinning him to the chair and eyed the woman draped over his lap. "Kate, stop it." He swallowed hard when her tongue slid up his neck. He tried to remember that she wasn't herself and he didn't want to take advantage of her.

She bit his earlobe lightly and sucked the sensitive flesh into her hot mouth.

Not taking advantage…riiiiight.

"Let me go." Half hearted, at best.

"Mmmm, Jethrrroo," his name thrummed through him, spilling from her lips. It had never felt so good coming from any other mouth. It was half plead and half purr and she wriggled down against him, grinding herself with a mewling gasp against his rock hard cock. He grunted and jerked against the chair and his bindings. "Taste good." She hummed against him and his arms strained, though this time not to be free but to grab a hold of her and pin her beneath him so he could really get this show on the road.

Gibbs might have been her superior officer and he might be able to split his emotions a bit more succinctly than her at work but he defied anyone to try and think platonic-work-related thoughts when a hot young thing like Caitlin Todd was planted on their lap and nibbling at the taught skin of his neck. He huffed out a panting breath and tried to rein himself in.

She isn't herself. She's had her head screwed with. She wouldn't do this otherwise.

The thoughts grew less insistent as Kate sat back, rocking her core against the scorching brand of his erection, causing them both a moment's groaning before she focused once more on the task at hand.

Undressing him.

He could see her pulse racing in the hollow of her throat, her skin was hectic with an all over flush and a sheen of sweat clung to her. She feverishly ran her hands over his chest and abs, he might not have still had that taut skinned body of a thirty year old but he had taken on the husky beefiness of an older man who still had plenty of raw power under his belt. It was a raunchy packing of solid muscle that Kate apparently couldn't resist. Her hands drifted over the heaving muscles of his stomach and lower and his hips bucked under her without his conscious decision.

"Fuck!" He groaned.

"Don't worry, Jethrro, I intend to." She smiled at him, running her tongue over her teeth and scoring her nails over the pink raised scars that she had left on him days before. His skin felt like it was on fire in the wake of her touch and she smirked in that purely female way of hers. "But I think I'll be in charge this time." She hummed in the back of her throat at the pleasing thought and Gibbs' head snapped to take her in.

"You remember?"

"Mmmm…" She wriggled against him again and rational thought took a momentary holiday when she unsnapped his belt and the rasp of his zipper filled the room as it split against the back of her hand. The sound mixed with the creaking of the chair under them and floated over their harsh breathing. "Course I do. You were very much…on top."

Gibbs couldn't stand it any longer. He had to touch her. He leant forward urgently, burying his face in her neck, breathing in the strawberry vanilla scent of her shampoo.

"Tell me." He growled harshly.

"Oh, Jethrrro…" She smiled and looked momentarily drunk, rocking back and away from him so she could see him, hands looped around his broad twitching shoulders. "You were amazing." That hushed, breathless tone of her voice, the barest hint of a throaty moan in there, like he had already brought her to satisfaction, had the rest of Gibbs' blood flow giving up the ghost completely and heading for Southern climes. "I have to admit, I wasn't sure if you'd still have it in you but….well, you proved me wrong by having it _all_ in me." She smirked at him, hands dipping down once more and tugging his pants apart with a look of unhindered glee on her face.

He shivered.

"You took me hard and fast." She whispered against his mouth, the excitement now getting to them both. "Then slow and _intense_." She wrapped her dainty fingers around him and Gibbs made a strained noise in the back of his throat. The woman was trying to give him a heart attack, he decided, but what a way to go!

"Oh look, both hands and still some to spare…what's a girl to do?" She sighed and stroked him teasingly, lightly at first and then with firmer more confident caresses. Gibbs threw back his head and growled, scrabbling for control.

"What's the matter, Jethrrrro?" She sing-songed into his ear. Kissed her way to his jaw and then took his mouth in a stunning kiss, nipping at his lips and sucking hard on his tongue.

He just about came then and there.

"Kate!" He tore his mouth from hers, trying to regain some control of the situation, or his body at the very least.

"Uh-uh, Jethrro, I'm in charge now. It's all very well for you to pin me up against my own front door and fuck me where _anybody_ could've walked past and seen us, but I want the chance to pleasure you now."

"I did that? Against your front door?" Gibbs tried to sound appalled to himself, but the way his cock twitched in her hands made that kind of redundant.

"Oh yeeaaahh…I've never been so turned on. My neighbour spoke to me the next morning and asked me if I'd heard screaming last night. She thought someone was being mugged." Kate bit her tongue between her white teeth and grinned. "Rhythmically."

Gibbs made an abrupt choking sound.

"I didn't remember at the time, of course, but now it's all _flooding_ back. Every touch, every kiss, every bite, every suck…" she whispered in his ear. "Every fuck."

Gibbs was going to go insane. He had to get out of these cuffs. He rolled his shoulders uselessly and growled when the cuffs didn't give an inch. Well, they wouldn't.

"Katy, let me go." He spoke directly into her ear. He was desperate to be free. His eyes rolled back in his head when her hands tightened on his cock and _stroked._

"Why?" She spoke against his mouth and then slid her mouth against his in a deep drugging kiss that had him forgetting up from down.

"I want…" Gibbs' chest was heaving. He felt like he'd run a marathon. He blinked and shook his head, trying to get his thought processes back on track. His back arched as her hands worked him into a frenzy. He ground his teeth and dragged his thoughts back into cohesion out of sheer stubbornness.

"I want you…"

"That's fairly obvious, hon." Kate smirked at him and trailed her finger over the dripping tip of his cock then slowly licked her finger and savoured the taste of him. He jolted under the sensation and wished idly that the Katy he could cow into submission would come back for two damn minutes so he could get free.

"I need you to let me out of these cuffs." He spoke on a low rush and she tilted her head at him. Releasing his cock and gripping his shoulders, Gibbs had a momentary reprieve before she scooted forward again and trapped his erection between the overheating press of their bodies.

"Jesus!" Gibbs twisted in the chair in the vain hope of surcease but she wasn't done with him yet. Not nearly. "Let me go!"

"Not until you give me a good reason why."

"Because you'll never get the leverage to ride me properly in the chair like this!" Gibbs blinked at himself. He was pretty sure he hadn't intended to say something like that. He had been going for a logical argument and he supposed that technically fitted the criteria but not exactly the tone he was going for.

"Finally, you're seeing it my way." Kate smirked a little drunkenly at him and produced the key to the cuffs from…_somewhere._ she stood up and leaned over him, giving him a face full of cleavage for her troubles, and worried at the cuffs.

_Ka-chink. _The lock opened.

The noise was tiny under their laboured breathing but it sounded like the blast of a starter gun to Gibbs. He yanked his arms free and had them around Kate's surprised frame before she could blink. Her shirt was a victim to his pouncing and it tore open with a satisfying pinging of buttons. He knew that he should have been using his new found freedom to fend her off. Put her away from him, zip up his pants and get the hell out of dodge, but she'd been teasing him too long. Baited the bear and now she had to pay the price.

In mind destroying orgasms, was just peachy for him.

His teeth seized the flimsy material of her lacy bra, hot pink of all colours, and yanked it down and out of the way. He licked his way up over the curve of her breast and sucked the pebbled nipple into his mouth with a throaty groan from her. Her head kicked back and her fingers delved into his hair. He reminded himself that he should be putting her down and calling a stop to all this but…in a minute.

"You. Naked. Now." It was about as coherent as he was getting at the moment.

His words were muffled by her skin and his hands sliding down over her slim waist to yank at the snap of her slacks. _Why _did the woman have to be wearing pants? The remnants of his handcuffs clinked as he gripped her slacks and yanked them down the long length of her legs and off. Her panties followed next so she was only in her shirt and squint bra. Gibbs crawled back up her body and assaulted her mouth with his own. She met him thrust for thrust with her tongue and then did a strange Secret Service (he would later convince himself) move that had him on his back. She straddled him with a wicked smile on her lips and pinned his hands to the floor above his head with her own. Her knees gripped his hips tight and he growled, bucking up against her. His cock, red hot and dripping, slid against her wet centre and she threw her head back on a lusty moan.

"Oh yes." She released one of his hands long enough to fist his cock in her grip and then twist her hips down, impaling herself on him with a gasp and a widening of her eyes that let him know she was still heartily impressed with his size. She folded over him with a moan and panted into his ear. "You feel so…_huge_."

Gibbs grunted in reply, trying to tell his heart not to stop beating out of pleasure overload even as his cock twitched inside her and swelled further, filling her and wringing a desperate pleasured sound from her.

"Kate," he was kidding himself if he thought he could get her to stop now, so he gripped her hips instead. "Ride me."

Her lust glazed eyes and drunken dilated pupils met his and a smile graced her lips. "Oh, yes." She gripped his shoulders, balancing herself nimbly on her knees and drew herself off him with a rippling of muscles.

Gibbs' chest contracted, his fingers tightened on her hips hard enough to bruise and the chords of his neck stood out clearly then she sank slowly back down onto him.

"_Jesus!"_

"Tsk-tsk," she scolded him breathlessly, finding her rhythm, nails kneading against his shoulders when she tightened her grip. "Taking the Lord's name in vain. Against the rules." She twisted her hips slowly and tightened internal muscles that Gibbs hadn't realised women had conscious control over. His eyes rolled back in his head and he groaned like a man mortally wounded.

She was going too slow.

Gibbs sat up, his chest brushing tantalisingly against hers. He tore the shirt from her shoulders and her bra followed close behind. She was now completely naked save for her little golden cross bouncing against her heaving chest. His arms slid around her, anchoring her to him. Then, using his entire body, he controlled her rise and fall. Rolling his hips under her, pulling out a little further and thrusting in deeper with every rise and fall of her body over his.

He couldn't last long, he knew. Not with her breath gusting hot against his neck, her moans rolling into his ear. Her hair tumbled silky and soft over his face, her spine arched under his hands and her pussy was slick and soft and tight around his pulsing cock.

Determined to make it good for her too, he pulled her down tighter against him. He rocked back and forth inside her with small but bone jarringly powerful movements that hitched her breath with every jolt. Like this, he knew her clit was going to be crushed against his pubic bone and that each roll of his hips was going to dial the pressure up and down and force her higher and higher. Her nails sank into the muscles of his back, her teeth scraped his neck and she got louder and louder the closer she got.

Gibbs grinned even as he grunted with the effort of keeping her where she was. She was going wild, not knowing if she wanted to get closer or away from the maddening sensations racking her body. Those gasps and mewls of pleasure sounded familiar and he could only hope that they echoed the first times she remembered so clearly but were still nothing but a blank to him.

She suddenly grabbed his hair and yanked his head back, her mouth slanted over his and he knew she was on the knife edge. Yanking her down for the last time, he rolled his hips back and forth but this time side to side. He pushed as deep as he could and thrust to the deepest part of her.

She came apart in his arms with a muffled scream into his mouth, her legs tight around his hips and convulsively shivering around him with the aftershocks.

Gibbs couldn't hold back any longer. Devouring her mouth in a kiss so hot it almost steamed, he pulled her even tighter against him and exploded inside her. Coming in hot fierce jets that scalded her inside and sent her back into the clawing throes of a second orgasm that seemed to last forever.

They collapsed back onto the floor together, the rug rough against Gibbs' back. Gibbs panted roughly, Kate rising and falling on his chest with each haul of air into his burning lungs. Every single muscle in his body twinged with the effort he had just put it through. His very bones ached with the hot shaking fatigue of a body well used and he didn't know if he was inches from death or seconds from flipping her onto her back and going for round two.

Her next words decided it for him.

Kate sat up and looked down at him her eyes surprisingly clear considering the pulse still hammering at her throat and the hectic flush covering her entire body.

"Oh no, not again."

**$inister $cribe**

The department issue Delaney mounted the kerb outside Gibbs' residence and Hotch and Susan both hopped out of their seats before the engine had even idled to a stop.

"You're sure they're here?" Hotch had slipped into that low combat ready gait that they must teach at the Academy and drew his weapon from its holster.

"Yes, I can OH GAWD!" Susan staggered on the garden path and fell to her knees.

Hotch doubled back and crouched beside her when she didn't rise.

"Susan, what is it? What's wrong?"

"Nothing, I…" She tried to get to her feet but her legs buckled under her and she convulsed with a restrained gasp.

"What?" Hotch holstered his weapon and wrapped both arms around his friend. "Talk to me."

Susan was doubled over, chest heaving and her body twitching intermittently. She shook all over, her colour was high and a rosy sweat slicked her skin. She was practically glowing.

"I'm fine." She gasped, her hands gripping Hotch's shoulders. "Help me up. Back to the car." She turned him on the path to go back the way they'd come. She leaned on him heavily. She didn't think her shivering legs would let her support her own weight yet.

"Wait, shouldn't we check on…?" Hotch was torn between his concern for Susan and the serial killer in waiting that was supposed to be in that house.

"Oh, they're fine." Susan waved it off and let Hotch lift her back up into the passenger seat of the car. "We should all be so fine." She collapsed back against the seat and let her head fall back. Her throat worked as she swallowed hard and she trembled all over with an inane little smirk to her lips.

Hotch finally caught on to why the look seemed so familiar.

"Wait, they…?" Hotch looked back to the house and then back to Susan. "And you just…"

"I had to key into their vitals to find them, make sure they'd still be in one piece and knock them out if I had to. I thought…well I didn't think they'd be doing THAT." She chuckled throaty and purring to herself. "I didn't think the connection would go both ways like that. Oh my, that Lieutenant's quite something. You think it's something to do with the rank? Explains a lot about Olivia and Horatio."

She dissolved into little sated giggles and missed the stern expression on Hotch's face. Had she been paying attention, she might have gotten the shock of her life.

He slammed the door on her side and strode around the front of the car with abbreviated movements that would have made an onlooker cross the street to get away from him. He yanked open his door and jumped up into the seat, keying the ignition and gunning the engine loud enough to get Susan to loll her head in his direction.

"Something wrong, love?"

"Yeah." His knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. "You've developed a new power. You couldn't do that a couple of years ago and now you can. You also told me that people with your abilities that start manifesting new skills at your age tend to go insane and then die."

Susan blinked at him and then looked away in a hurry.

"So, yes, something is wrong and YOU have some explaining to do."


End file.
